  The flexibility of radio frequency (RF) systems and the omnipresence of power
cables potentially make the cascaded power line communication (PLC)/RF system
an efficient and cost-effective solution in terms of wide coverage and
high-speed transmission. This letter proposes an opportunistic
decode-and-forward (DF)-based multi-wire/RF relaying system to exploit the
advantages of both techniques. The outage probability, bit error rate, and
system channel capacity are correspondingly chosen to analyze the properties of
the proposed system, which are derived in closed-form expressions and validated
via Monte-Carlo simulations. One can observe that our proposed system
outperforms the wireless-only system in terms of coverage and data rate,
especially when there exists a non-line-of-sight (NLoS) connection between the
transmitter and receiver pair.
