Enhancing the Reliability of Two-Way Vehicle-to-Grid Communications

Narrowband power line communications (NB-PLC) and unlicensed wireless communications are the two leading communications technologies for the emerging two-way Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) communications applications. In this paper, we exploit the media diversity provided by the availability of both the NB-PLC and wireless links to enhance the robustness against the interference and noise encountered on both links. In particular, we propose two efficient media diversity selection schemes to exploit the decoupled nature of the two communication links to reduce the bit error rate (BER) and increase the reliability of the V2G communication system. In addition, we derive closed-form expressions for the BER of our proposed media diversity selection schemes. Furthermore, we present simulation results that quantify the performance gains achieved by our proposed media diversity selection schemes compared to a single link (i.e. wireless-only or PLC-only) performance.