RIS Assisted Dual-Hop Mixed PLC/RF for Smart Grid Applications

In this letter, we analyze the performance of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted mixed power line communication (PLC)/radio frequency (RF) system in smart grid application. In a smart grid, the data concentrator (DC) plays an important role in communication between the home appliances through the access point (AP). The DC can communicate using the existing PLC up to the AP, and the AP interacts with the home appliances with advanced communication technology like RIS-based RF communication. The modulation scheme is considered here as binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) modulation. Based on the system model, a closed-form expression for average bit error probability (ABEP) and outage probability (OP) are derived and analyzed by varying the various parameters like the number of reflectors in the RIS, impulsive noise scenario in the PLC channel.