Energy-Efficient Outage Probability Minimization in AF-Relayed Power Line Communication

Energy-efficient resource allocation to achieve desired throughput over energy-aware power line communications (PLCs) has gained a growing interest from the past few years. In order to improve it further, we propose a joint solution methodology for efficient utilization of available resources to minimize energy-aware outage probability in an amplified-and-forward (AF) relay-assisted PLC. In this regard, first, we derive a closed-form expression for energy-efficiency based outage probability. Using the statistical properties of the outage probability, an equivalent problem, more tractable for optimizations, is formulated and respective closed-form solutions are obtained for individual and joint optimization of relay location and power allocation (PA) over the transmit modems. Using the numerical investigations, we validate our outage analysis and describe the design insights on the obtained optimal solution. Finally, it is shown that the joint optimization provides an outage improvement of around 55% against a benchmark scheme.