Two-way communication is a key feature in a smart grid. It is enabled byeither powerline communication or wireless communication technologies.Utilizing both technologies can potentially enhance communication reliability,and many diversity combining schemes have been proposed. In this paper, wepropose a flexible real-time testbed to evaluate diversity combining schemesover physical channels. The testbed provides essential parts of physical layerson which both powerline and wireless communications operate. The contributionsof this paper are 1) design and implementation of a real-time testbed fordiversity of simultaneous powerline and wireless communications, 2) release ofthe setup information and complete source code for the testbed, and 3)performance evaluation of maximal ratio combining (MRC) on the testbed. Asinitial results, we show that performance of MRC from measurements obtained onthe testbed over physical channels is very close to that in simulations invarious test cases under a controlled laboratory environment.
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