Performance Analysis of A SLIPT-Based Hybrid VLC/RF System

To alleviate the energy constraint and coverage limitations in Internet of Things applications, in this paper we investigate a dual-hop hybrid visible light communication (VLC)/radio frequency (RF) cooperative communication system based on simultaneous lightwave information and power transfer. The proposed system consists of a light-emitting diode source (S), an off-the-grid relay (R) that moves randomly within the coverage of S, and a destination (D) that is located outside the coverage of S. To facilitate communications between S and D, the received optical signal at R in the first phase can be separated into alternating current and direct current components for information decoding and energy harvesting, respectively. Then the energy harvested by R is used to forward the decoded information to D using RF in the second phase. In view of the distinct channel conditions across the two hops, the decoding status and the energy available at R, the end-to-end system outage probability is analytically derived. Simulation results are used to evaluate the impact of different system parameters and demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed system.