Comparative Performance Analysis of Cooperative Outdoor PLC

With the arrival of the Smart Grid, the electrical network is undergoing deep changes that has also included the data communication field. To study the behavior and the efficiency of this technology, a Power Line Communication (PLC) module based on the network simulator NS-3 was recently developed to compete with the usual Matlab evaluation. This allowed a more realistic simulation of PLC-based Smart Grid communication on all levels of the OSI model. Through this work, we present a comparative analysis between the PLC theoretical model, evaluated with Matlab, and the NS-3 dedicated module in a context of an outdoor communication. To compensate power losses over extended networks, we adopted the cooperative communication using a relay station at a residential city. The comparative study includes direct and relay-assisted transmission based on the Amplify and Forward (AF) and the Decode and Forward (DF) protocols, in the presence of several noises. The different implementations showed the performance of the cooperative communication in terms of the efficiency of the channel. Also, implementations proved the relative correspondence of the analytical results and simulation outputs for two different modelization approaches which are the ABCD matrix and voltage ratio.