Outage and error performance analysis of dual hop hybrid RF-VLC system with wireless energy harvesting

The presented paper, investigates a dual hop hybrid radio frequency-visible light communication (RF-VLC) system with wireless energy harvesting at the relay. The information signal is transmitted via RF channel from the source (S) (located at some distant location) towards the destination (D). We assumed that there is no direct connectivity between S and D, thus a decode and forward relay (R) is used as an intermediate node between S and D. The source transmits the information signal towards the relay via RF channel. The received information signal at the relay is processed and converted into corresponding optical signal. The optical information signal is then forwarded to the destination. Parallelly, the relay employs the power splitting relaying (PSR) protocol with harvest-then cooperate (HTC) protocol for energy harvesting. The harvested energy is utilized to forward the optical information signal from relay to the user at the destination located inside a building's room via VLC channel. We assumed that the RF and the VLC channels are modelled by generalized-K fading distribution and lambertian emission model respectively. The statistical characteristics are derived for the instantaneous signal to noise ratio of the individual channels using PSR protocol. Further, these statistics are used to derive the accurate closed form expressions for end to end outage probability and average bit error rate. Moreover, with the help of numerical results, end to end performance of the hybrid RF-VLC system under the influence of various system parameters such as shadowing parameters, power splitting factor, field of view angle of the detector and the distance between the source and the relay is analysed and verified. (C) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.