Outage Probability in a Hybrid VLC/RF Network Enhanced by Energy Harvesting Relay

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a hybrid visible light communication (VLC)/radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) network with multiple VLC access points (APs) and energy harvesting relays (EHRs). The EHRs can gather light energy, receive information from the VLC APs and relay information to a user via an RF channel. EHR-enhanced VLC/RF links or single-hop VLC-ONLY links allow users to receive information from VLC APs. Subsequently, we propose a link selection strategy so as to get the best performance. By applying stochastic geometry, we derive the outage probability of two transmission links and the whole VLC/RF system. Lastly, we examine the effects of various factors on the outage probability using numerical results, and it can be found that our proposed VLC-RF system achieves lower outage probability compared to the standalone VLC system.