Optimal Design of Energy-Harvesting Hybrid VLC-RF Networks

In this extended abstract, we consider a dual-hop hybrid visible light communication (VLC)/radio frequency (RF) scenario where energy is harvested during the VLC transmission and used to power the relay. We formulate the optimization problem in the sense of maximizing the data rate under the assumption of decode-and-forward (DF) relaying. As the design parameters, the direct current (DC) bias and the assigned time duration for energy harvesting are taken into account. In particular, the joint optimization is split into two subproblems, which are then cyclically solved. Additional details and numerical results are left to be presented in the full paper.