  The high attenuation which increases as frequency increases in power line
communication systems (PLC) makes achieving and sustaining high data rates over
such channels a challenging task. In most communication systems, relays are
normally deployed to overcome the effect of signal attenuation and to achieve
reliable transmissions between users. Amplifyand- forward (AF) and
decode-and-forward (DF) relays are often used. In contrast to the existing work
on this topic which advocate utilizing relays either between PLC links or
between wireless links, the authors of this paper focus on using AF relaying
for in-home PLC and wireless systems where one PLC user wants to share data
with one wireless user which has no access to the PLC network. We refer to this
system as the Hybrid approach. A mathematical method is developed for this
network to formulate the capacity of the system by exploiting the statistical
properties of both PLC and wireless channels. Monte Carlo simulations are used
throughout this paper to validate the analytical results. The impact of several
system parameters is investigated in this paper. For the sake of comparison, we
also provide the performance analysis and results for a PLC only network. The
results showed that the performance of the hybrid system enhances as we
increase the relay gain and deteriorates as the end-to-end distance increases.
It is also found that the PLC only scheme may outperform the hybrid one if the
relay gain is relatively small; however, the user mobility offered by the
hybrid system remains the main advantage over the PLC only system.
