A Joint Opportunistic Energy Harvesting and Communication System Using VLC for Battery-Less PV-Equipped IoT

The trend of high-speed Internet of Things (IoT) devices with secure, interference-free and health-neutral communication promotes Visible Light Communication (VLC) as a promising candidate to complement or replace radiofrequency communication for indoor applications. This paper proposes a Joint Opportunistic Energy Harvesting and Communication system (JOE-HC) using VLC. This system can perform Simultaneous Light Information and Power Transfer (SLIPT) to support battery-less photovoltaic (PV)-equipped IoT devices. The spatial Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise-Ratio (SINR) is optimized using the Spatial-Time Division Switching (S-TDS) scheduling approach in the JOE-HC. In this approach, we add a time delay guard to eliminate the signal interference caused by the switching impairments of the light transmitters, where the Light-Emitting-Diode (LED) serves for illumination and communication purposes. The simulation results show that the SINR at a time slot has increased a maximum of 9 dB in the overlapping regions by employing the proposed scheduling scheme.