Error performance of hybrid wireless-power line communication system

This paper considers a hybrid wireless-power line communication system for smart meter and grid interaction. The performance of the considered system is evaluated for different switching schemes such as threshold based switching, random switching, and selection combining. The power line channel is characterized using the log-normal random variable, whereas the channel response for the wireless link is modeled as the Nakagami-m distributed random variable. The expressions for average bit-error-rate (BER) for the considered switching/combining schemes are obtained, and the average BER performances of all the considered combining schemes are compared. The results are verified through simulations.