Two-Way Hybrid Power-Line and Wireless Amplify-and-Forward Relay Communication Systems

Power-line communication (PLC) has influenced smart grid development. In addition, PLC has also been instrumental in current research on internet-of-things (IoT). Due to the implementation of PLC in smart grid and IoT environments, strides have been made in PLC and its combination with the wireless system to form a hybrid communication system. Also, PLC has evolved from a single-input-single-output (SISO) configuration to multipleinput-multiple-output (MIMO) configuration system, and from a point-to-point communication system to cooperative communication systems. In this work, we extend a MIMO wireless two-way amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative communication system to a hybrid PLC and wireless (PLC/W) system configuration. We then maximize the weighted sum-rate for the hybrid PLC/W by optimizing the precoders at each node within the hybrid PLC/W system. The sum-rate problem was found to be non-convex, therefore, an iterative algorithm is used to find the optimal precoders that locally maximize the system sum-rate. For our simulation results, we compare our proposed hybrid PLC/W configuration to a PLC only and wireless only configuration at each node. Due to an improvement in system diversity, the hybrid PLC/W configuration outperformed the PLC only and wireless only system configurations in all simulation results presented in this paper.