On multiple‐domain cooperative diversity for communications with distributed content in G.hn networks
Broadband data applications can be delivered to homes over the available home network infrastructure (i.e., mediums). Further enhancement of the network performance is possible by exploiting spatial, time, or frequency diversity. Recently, MIMO systems have been proposed for power line communication (PLC) networks. Because of the extremely diverse physical characteristics of the mediums, an implementation of MIMO systems in G.hn across different domains represents a non‐trivial task. In this paper, we present and theoretically evaluate the performance of multiple‐domain diversity mechanism in G.hn using a cross‐layer classification algorithm. In the proposed network architecture, the signal is transmitted over different mediums selected by the classification algorithm in order to meet the quality‐of‐service demands. At the receiver, joint signal combining and equalization are done to take advantage of the multiple‐domain cooperative diversity and increase the signal‐to‐noise ratio. The merit of the proposed multiple‐domain PLC network has been confirmed by analytical performance analysis and computer simulation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.