Resource Allocation of Hybrid VLC/RF Systems With Light Energy Harvesting

In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing the sum throughput of K users in a hybrid heterogeneous visible light communication (VLC)/radio frequency (RF) wireless communication system. This is done by optimizing the transmission time intervals of a time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme allocated to the users in two different downlink (DL) scenarios. In both scenarios, using the harvested energy, each user transmits its signal in an optimal allocated time interval over the uplink (UL) channel. In the first scenario, a lightwave powered communication network (LPCN)-based VLC system is used to radiate only optical energy to be harvested by the users over DL channel. Specifically, UL sum-rate maximization problem is formulated by optimizing UL time allocations. In the second scenario, a time switching-based simultaneous lightwave information and power transfer (TS-based SLIPT) is considered where the light-emitting diode (LED) transmitter sends both information and power simultaneously over DL channel. Specifically, we propose a multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP) to study the trade-off between the UL and DL sum-rates. The non-convex MOOP framework is then transformed into an equivalent form, which yields a set of Pareto optimal resource allocation policies. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is illustrated through numerical results.