Smart Grid Network With D2D Communication and Coherent PLC: Error Analysis

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a hybrid smart grid communication network consisting of power line communication (PLC) at the transmitter side and the device-to-device (D2D) cellular communication on the receiver side which provides last mile connectivity. The PLC channel is assumed to experience Rayleigh fading and is corrupted by impulsive noise, and the D2D communication being a short range communication system, is assumed to experience Nakagami-m fading with additive Gaussian noise. We propose a maximal-ratio combining (MRC) receiver for the considered hybrid smart grid communication system employing binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation at the transmitter and derive a closed-form symbol error probability (SEP) expression for the proposed receiver. The interference between the D2D links is assumed to be negligible for the tractability of the error probability analysis. Numerical results demonstrate the optimality of operating the D2D links at lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values to overcome the effect of the impulsive PLC channel by utilizing diversity branches.