Optimal subcarrier pairing for MRC in powerline/wireless diversity OFDM systems

In this paper, we consider the parallel use of powerline/wireless orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems for robust smart grid communication, where the powerline and wireless subcarriers are paired to perform maximal ratio combining (MRC). An optimal subcarrier pairing scheme is proposed to maximize the data rate for MRC reception in powerline/wireless diversity OFDM systems. We verify the performance enhancement of the proposed optimal subcarrier pairing scheme by varying the system and channel parameters. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme provides about 15-30 Mbps of higher data rate, which corresponds to a capacity gain of about 5-22%, compared to the pairing scheme without specific intelligence. Performance improvement in terms of outage probability is also shown.