Energy Harvesting Based on SLIPT in I2V-VLC System

Vehicular connectivity is mostly based on wireless access. The vehicular applications may be limited due to the limited battery life of the equipment involved. To address this issue, a method based on simultaneous light wave information and power transfer (SLIPT) is proposed for harvesting the energy in the Infrastructure-to-Vehicle Visible Light Communication (I2VVLC) system. The purpose of SLIPT is to harvest energy using light sources while decoding information. This article studies the effect of SLIPT in an I2V-VLC system. In this method, the received light from the traffic light source at the vehicle is harvested while decoding the information signal. First, for I2VVLC channel modeling, a recent realistic channel model using the ray-tracing method is utilized. Then, we propose the energy harvesting analysis based on the SLIPT strategy. After that, we investigate the impact of both the longitudinal and lateral distance between the vehicle and the traffic light on the amount of harvested energy. Furthermore, we investigate the relationship between the achievable information rate and the harvested energy amount. The obtained results demonstrate the significant impact of the communication distance and the required information rate on the quantity of harvested energy.