  Relaying over power line communication (PLC) channels can considerably
enhance the performance and reliability of PLC systems. This paper is dedicated
to study and analyze the energy efficiency of multi-hop cooperative relaying
PLC systems. Incremental decode-and-forward (IDF) relying is exploited to
reduce the transmit power consumption. The PLC channel is assumed to experience
log-normal fading with impulsive noise. The performances of single-hop and
conventional DF relaying systems are also analyzed in terms of outage
probability and energy efficiency for which analytical expressions are derived.
Results show that using more relays can improve the outage probability
performance; however, this is achieved at the expense of increased power
consumption due to the increased static power of the relays, especially when
the total source-to-destination distance is relatively small. Results also
demonstrate that the IDF PLC system has better energy efficiency performance
compared to the other schemes.
