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PLC-RF diversity: channel outage analysis

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Abstract

Signals from indoor access points in a wireless fidelity suffer from high attenuation as a result of the thick walls and metal structures in the multilevel-storey buildings where they are deployed. This is due to the scattering of the retransmitted signals by the thick walls and metal structures. Power line communication (PLC) technology is considered as a solution to overcoming this challenge. In this paper, a combination of the RF and PLC technologies is proposed for achieving signal transmission in indoor environments taking into account the presence characteristic of multilevel-storey buildings. Diversity Combining techniques, namely, selection combining (SC) and maximum ratio combining (MRC) are exploited to recover the retransmitted message, then the outage probability for both the SC and the MRC are proposed. Furthermore, we analyze the hybrid system estimated implementation cost.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Johannesburg, P.O. Box 524, Auckland Park, Johannesburg, 2006, South Africa

    Frank Nonso Igboamalu, Alain Richard Ndjiongue & Hendrik Christoffel Ferreira

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  1. Frank Nonso Igboamalu
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  2. Alain Richard Ndjiongue
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  3. Hendrik Christoffel Ferreira
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Correspondence to Frank Nonso Igboamalu.

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Igboamalu, F.N., Ndjiongue, A.R. & Ferreira, H.C. PLC-RF diversity: channel outage analysis. Telecommun Syst 73, 521–530 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-019-00624-1

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