Performance Analysis of a Mixed Cooperative PLC–VLC System for Indoor Communication Systems

In this paper we propose a dual-hop mixed cooperative power line communication (PLC)-visible light communication (VLC) system, in which the VLC system is linked to the PLC backhaul link with the assistance of a decode and forward relay. The performance of the PLC link is evaluated under the effect of log-normal fading, and the link is presumed to be affected by both additive background and impulsive noises. The VLC link's channel characteristics are taken as a function of the position of the end users. The proposed study provides novel closed-form expressions of various statistics of the equivalent end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio of the considered system. Taking these derived entities into account, we also evaluate closed-form expressions of various performance metrics of the proposed system.