In this paper, incremental decode-and-forward (IDF) and incremental selective decode-and-forward (ISDF) relaying are proposed to improve the spectral efficiency of power line communication. Contrary to the traditional decode-and-forward (DF) relaying, IDF and ISDF strategies utilize the relay only if the direct link ceases to attain a certain information rate, thereby improving the spectral efficiency. The path gain through the power line is assumed to be log-normally distributed with high distance-dependent attenuation and the additive noise is from a Bernoulli-Gaussian process. Closed-form expressions for the outage probability, and approximate closed-form expressions for the end-to-end average channel capacity and the average bit error rate for binary phase-shift keying are derived. Furthermore, a closed-form expression for the fraction of times the relay is in use is derived as a measure of the spectral efficiency. Comparative analysis of IDF and ISDF with traditional DF relaying is presented. It is shown that IDF is a specific case of ISDF and can obtain optimal spectral efficiency without compromising the outage performance. By employing power allocation to minimize the outage probability, it is realized that the power should be allocated in accordance with the inter-node distances and channel parameters.
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