Simultaneous Lightwave Information and Power Transfer with Non-orthogonal Multiple Access

This paper proposes a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based simultaneous lightwave information and power transfer (SLIPT) scheme for downlink visible light communication (VLC) systems. A downlink VLC system with a light emitting diode (LED) transmitter and two users with photo detector (PD) receivers is considered. Also, a receiver circuit with a mode selector is proposed to be employed at each user. The proposed receiver circuit has energy harvesting capability by employing the power splitting (PS) as well as time switching (TS). The near user (NU) harvest energy utilizing PS protocol, whereas the far user (FU) utilized the TS protocol for energy harvesting. The numerical results are presented to illustrate that the user’s data rates and the energy efficiency (EE) of the NOMA based SLIPT system show superior performance compared to the OMA based SLIPT system. Also, the harvested energy of the proposed energy harvesting scheme is within the reach of OMA based SLIPT systems.