A Comparison between Orthogonal and Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access in Cooperative Relaying Power Line Communication Systems

Most, if not all, existing studies on power line communication (PLC) systems as well as industrial PLC standards are based on orthogonal multiple access schemes, such as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing and code-division multiple access. In this paper, we propose non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for decode-and-forward cooperative relaying PLC systems to achieve higher throughput and improve user fairness. To quantitatively characterize the proposed system performance, we also study conventional cooperative relaying (CCR) PLC systems. We evaluate the performance of the two systems in terms of the average capacity. In this respect, accurate analytical expressions for the average capacity are derived and validated with Monte Carlo simulations. The impact of several system parameters, such as the branching, impulsive noise probability, cable lengths, the power allocation coefficients, and input signal-to-noise ratio, is investigated. The results reveal that the performance of the proposed NOMA-PLC scheme is superior compared with that of the CCR-PLC system. It is also shown that the NOMA-PLC system can be more effective in reducing electromagnetic compatibility associated with PLC and that increasing the network branches can considerably degrade the performance. Moreover, optimizing the power allocation coefficients is found to be of utmost importance to maximize the performance of the proposed system.