Although powerlines have not been designed for data transmission, recent technical developments in Power Line Communication (PLC) have pushed the offered capacity much higher than expected, making PLC an interesting technology for last mile connections like the back-hauling considered in this work. On the other hand, cellular traffic is doubling every year, and this growth trend is not expected to end soon. Small cells have been advocated as a solution to fragment the network and increase the local capacity; in addition, new generation of mobile communication is likely to employ high frequency bands that will cover smaller areas, hence, an increase in cell density is expected. This will increase the challenge for the realization of a cost effective high performance back-haul to bridge the small cell network with the core network. Nowadays, the back-haul portion of the network is either wireless or high speed wireline (ADSL, optical fiber). This paper introduces the idea of employing PLC to support back-hauling for small radio cells. To assess the backhaul requirements and the performance of the integrated radio-PLC network, a topology model is proposed to describe both the small radio cell network layout and the power delivery grid used to both power and "data" connect the base stations. Then, a parametric cell traffic model is considered to measure the overall traffic to be transported through the PLC network and determine whether (under the power grid topology constraints) the PLC back-haul can meet the traffic demands.
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