In this paper, we study the performance of the downlink of a cellular network with automatic repeat-request (ARQ) and a half duplex decode-and-forward shared relay. In this system, two multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) base stations serve two single antenna users. A MIMO shared relay retransmits the lost packets to the target users. First, we study the system with direct retransmission from the base station and derive a closed form expression for the outage probability of the system.We show that the direct retransmission can overcome the fading, however, it cannot overcome the interference. After that, we invoke the shared relay and design the relay beamforming matrices such that the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) is improved at the users subject to power constraints on the relay. In the case when the transmission of only one user fails, we derive a closed form solution for the relay beamformers. On the other hand when both transmissions fail, we pose the beamforming problem as a sequence of non-convex feasibility problems. We use semidefinite relaxation (SDR) to convert each feasibility problem into a convex optimization problem. We ensure a rank one solution, and hence, there is no loss of optimality in SDR. Simulation results are presented showing the superior performance of the proposed relay beamforming strategy compared to direct ARQ system in terms of the outage probability.
Incorporating relaying techniques into Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) mechanisms gives a general impression of diversity and throughput enhancements. Allowing overhearing among multiple relays is also a known approach to increase the number of participating relays in ARQs. However, when opportunistic amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying is applied to cooperative ARQs, the system design becomes nontrivial and even involved. Based on outage analysis, the spatial and temporal diversities are first found sensitive to the received signal qualities of relays, and a link quality control mechanism is the…
Inspired by several delay-bounded mission-critical applications, this paper investigates chase-combining-based hybrid automatic repeat request (CC-HARQ) protocols to achieve high reliability in delay-constrained applications. A salient feature of our approach is to use the end-to-end delay constraint for computing the total number of ARQs permitted in the network, and then optimally distributing them across the nodes so as to minimize packet-drop-probability (PDP), which is the end-to-end reliability metric of interest. Since the chase-combining strategy combines the received packets across mu…
User scheduling and multiuser multi-antenna (MU-MIMO) transmission are at the core of high rate data-oriented downlink schemes of the next-generation of cellular systems (e.g., LTE-Advanced). Scheduling selects groups of users according to their channels vector directions and SINR levels. However, when scheduling is applied independently in each cell, the inter-cell interference (ICI) power at each user receiver is not known in advance since it changes at each new scheduling slot depending on the scheduling decisions of all interfering base stations. In order to cope with this uncertainty, we …
In this paper, the average successful throughput, i.e., goodput, of a coded 3-node cooperative network is studied in a Rayleigh fading environment. It is assumed that a simple automatic repeat request (ARQ) technique is employed in the network so that erroneously received codeword is retransmitted until successful delivery. The relay is assumed to operate in either amplify-and-forward (AF) or decode-and-forward (DF) mode. Under these assumptions, retransmission mechanisms and protocols are described, and the average time required to send information successfully is determined. Subsequently, th…
In this paper, novel cooperative automatic repeat request (ARQ) methods with network coding are proposed for two way relaying network. Upon a failed transmission of a packet, the network enters cooperation phase, where the retransmission of the packets is aided by the relay node. The proposed approach integrates network coding into cooperative ARQ, aiming to improve the network throughput by reducing the number of retransmissions. For successive retransmission, three different methods for choosing the retransmitting node are considered. The throughput of the methods are analyzed and compared. …
The cooperative automatic repeat request (C-ARQ) is a link layer relaying protocol which exploits the spatial diversity and allows the relay node to retransmit the source data packet to the destination, when the latter is unable to decode the source data correctly. This paper presents a cross-layer link adaptation design for C-ARQ based relay channels in which both source and relay nodes employ adaptive modulation coding and power adaptation at the physical layer. For this scenario, we first derive closed-form expressions for the system spectral efficiency and average power consumption. We the…
The paper treats a multiuser relay scenario where multiple user equipments (UEs) have a two-way communication with a common Base Station (BS) in the presence of a buffer-equipped Relay Station (RS). Each of the uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) transmission can take place over a direct or over a relayed path. Traditionally, the UL and the DL path of a given two-way link are coupled, that is, either both are direct links or both are relayed links. By removing the restriction for coupling, one opens the design space for a decoupled two-way links. Following this, we devise two protocols: orthogonal d…
We consider a half-duplex wireless relay network with hybrid-automatic retransmission request (HARQ) and Rayleigh fading channels. In this paper, we analyze the outage probability of the multi-relay delay-limited HARQ system with opportunistic relaying scheme in decode-and-forward mode, in which the \emph{best} relay is selected to transmit the source's regenerated signal. A simple and distributed relay selection strategy is proposed for multi-relay HARQ channels. Then, we utilize the non-orthogonal cooperative transmission between the source and selected relay for retransmitting of the source…
In a cooperative relay network, a relay node (R) facilitates data transmission to the destination node (D), when the latter is unable to decode the source node (S) data correctly. This paper considers such a system model and presents a cross-layer approach to jointly design adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) at the physical layer and cooperative truncated automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol at the data link layer. We first derive a closed form expression for the spectral efficiency of the joint cooperative ARQ-AMC scheme. Aiming at maximizing this performance measure, we then optimize tw…
In this paper we study decode-and-forward multi-antenna relay systems that achieve bi-directional communication in two time slots. We investigate different downlink broadcast schemes which employ binary or analog network coding at the relay. We also analyze and compare their performances in terms of diversity order and symbol error probability. It is shown that if exact downlink channel state information is available at the relay, using analog network coding in the form of multi-antenna maximal-ratio transmit beamforming to precode the information vectors at the relay gives the best performanc…
In this paper, linear beamforming design for amplify-and-forward relaying cellular networks is considered, in which base station, relay station and mobile terminals are all equipped with multiple antennas. The design is based on minimum mean-square-error criterion, and both uplink and downlink scenarios are considered. It is found that the downlink and uplink beamforming design problems are in the same form, and iterative algorithms with the same structure can be used to solve the design problems. For the specific cases of fully loaded or overloaded uplink systems, a novel algorithm is derived…
This paper studies the problem of relay-assisted user scheduling for downlink wireless transmission. The base station or access point employs hybrid automatic-repeat-request (HARQ) with the assistance of a set of fixed relays to serve a set of mobile users. By minimizing a cost function of the queue lengths at the base station and the number of retransmissions of the head-of-line packet for each user, the base station can schedule an appropriate user in each time slot and an appropriate transmitter to serve it. It is shown that a priority-index policy is optimal for a linear cost function with…
Two-way relaying (TWR) reduces the spectral-efficiency loss caused in conventional half-duplex relaying. TWR is possible when two nodes exchange data simultaneously through a relay. In cellular systems, data exchange between base station (BS) and users is usually not simultaneous e.g., a user (TUE) has uplink data to transmit during multiple access (MAC) phase, but does not have downlink data to receive during broadcast (BC) phase. This non-simultaneous data exchange will reduce TWR to spectrally-inefficient conventional half-duplex relaying. With infrastructure relays, where multiple users co…
We consider a two-hop cellular system in which the mobile nodes help the base station by relaying information to the dead spots. While two-hop cellular schemes have been analyzed previously, the distribution of the node locations has not been explicitly taken into account. In this paper, we model the node locations of the base stations and the mobile stations as a point process on the plane and then analyze the performance of two different two-hop schemes in the downlink. In one scheme the node nearest to the destination that has decoded information from the base station in the first hop is us…
A downlink single-input single-output non-orthogonal multiple access system is considered in which a base station (BS) is communicating with two legitimate users in the presence of an external eavesdropper. A group of trusted cooperative half-duplex relay nodes, powered by the BS, is employed to assist the BS's transmission. The goal is to design relaying schemes such that the legitimate users' secrecy rate region is maximized subject to a total power constraint on the BS and the relays' transmissions. Three relaying schemes are investigated: cooperative jamming, decode-and-forward, and amplif…
Massive random access plays a central role in supporting the Internet of Things (IoT), where a subset of a large population of users simultaneously transmit small packets to a central base station. While there has been much research on the design of protocols for massive access in the uplink, the problem of providing message acknowledgments back to the users has been somewhat neglected. Reliable communication needs to rely on two-way communication for acknowledgement and retransmission. Nevertheless, because of the many possible subsets of active users, providing acknowledgments requires a sig…
Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is envisioned to be an integral component of 5G networks, and a technique for meeting the demand for high data rates. In a cellular network, D2D allows not only direct communication between users, but also device relaying. In this paper, a simple instance of device-relaying is investigated, and the impact of D2D on fairness among users is studied. Namely, a cellular network consisting of two D2D-enabled users and a base-station (BS) is considered. Thus, the users who want to establish communication with the BS can act as relays for each other's signals. Whi…
In this paper, spectrum-sharing technology is integrated into cellular systems to improve spectrum efficiency. Macrocell users are primary users (PUs) while those within local cells, e.g., femtocell users, or desiring cost-effective services, e.g., roamers, are identified as secondary users (SUs). The SUs share the spectrum resources of the PUs in a underlay way, thus the transmit power of a secondary is strictly limited by the primary's tolerable interference power. Given such constraints, a cooperative relaying transmission between a SU and the macrocell base station (BS) is necessary. In or…
In this work, we consider a typical three-node, two-way relaying network (TWRN) over fading channels. The aim is to minimize the entire system energy usage for a TWRN in the long run, while satisfying the required average symmetric exchange rate between the two source nodes. To this end, the energy usage of the physical-layer network coding (PNC) or the superposition coding based digital network coding (SPC-DNC) is analyzed. The rule on selection of both strategies is then derived by comparison. Based on the observed rule, we then design a scheme by switching between PNC and SPC-DNC for each c…
Due to its promising performance in a wide range of practical scenarios, Rate-Splitting (RS) has recently received significant attention in academia for the downlink of communication systems. In this letter, we propose and analyse a Cooperative Rate-Splitting (CRS) strategy based on the three-node relay channel where the transmitter is equipped with multiple antennas. By splitting user messages and linearly precoding common and private streams at the transmitter, and opportunistically asking the relaying user to forward its decoded common message, CRS can efficiently cope with a wide range of …
We consider a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relaying boardcast channel in downlink cellular networks, where the base station and the relay stations are both equipped with multiple antennas, and each user terminal has only a single antenna. In practical scenarios, channel estimation is imperfect at the receivers. Aiming at maximizing the SINR at each user, we develop two robust linear beamforming schemes respectively for the single relay case and the multi-relay case. The two proposed schemes are based on sigular value decomposition (SVD), minimum mean square error (MMSE) and regularize…
In this paper, we consider a three node, two-way relay system with digital network coding over static channels where all link gains are assumed to be constant during transmission. The aim is to minimize total energy consumption while ensuring queue stability at all nodes, for a given pair of random packet arrival rates. Specifically, we allow for a set of transmission modes and solve for the optimal fraction of resources allocated to each mode, including multiaccess uplink transmission mode and network coding broadcasting mode. In addition, for the downlink, we find the condition to determine …
A wireless relay with multiple antennas is called a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) switch if it maps its input links to its output links using "precode-and-forward." Namely, the MIMO switch precodes the received signal vector in the uplink using some matrix for transmission in the downlink. This paper studies the scenario of $K$ stations and a MIMO switch, which has full channel state information. The precoder at the MIMO switch is either a zero-forcing matrix or a network-coded matrix. With the zero-forcing precoder, each destination station receives only its desired signal with enhanc…
While two-way relaying is a promising way to enhance the spectral efficiency of wireless networks, the imbalance of relay-user distances may lead to excessive wireless power at the nearby-users. To exploit the excessive power, the recently proposed harvest-then-transmit technique can be applied. However, it is well-known that harvest-then-transmit introduces uplink-downlink coupling for a user. Together with the co-dependent relationship between paired users and interference among multiple user pairs, wirelessly powered two-way relay network suffers from the unique pairwise uplink-downlink cou…
In this paper, a backscatter cooperation (BC) scheme is proposed for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) downlink transmission. The key idea is to enable one user to split and then backscatter part of its received signals to improve the reception at another user. To evaluate the performance of the proposed BC-NOMA scheme, three benchmark schemes are introduced. They are the non-cooperation (NC)-NOMA scheme, the conventional relaying (CR)-NOMA scheme, and the incremental relaying (IR)-NOMA scheme. For all these schemes, the analytical expressions of the minimum total power to avoid informatio…
We consider a downlink periodic wireless communications system where multiple access points (APs) cooperatively transmit packets to a number of devices, e.g. actuators in an industrial control system. Each period consists of two phases: an uplink training phase and a downlink data transmission phase. Each actuator must successfully receive its unique packet within a single transmission phase, else an outage is declared. Such an outage can be caused by two events: a transmission error due to transmission at a rate that the channel cannot actually support or time overflow, where the downlink dat…
This paper considers an unmanned-aerial-vehicle-enabled (UAV-enabled) wireless network where a relay UAV is used for two-way communications between a ground base station (BS) and a set of distant user equipment (UE). The UAV adopts the amplify-and-forward strategy for two-way relaying over orthogonal frequency bands. The UAV positioning and the transmission powers of all nodes are jointly designed to maximize the sum rate of both uplink and downlink subject to transmission power constraints and the signal-to-noise ratio constraint on the UAV control channel. The formulated joint positioning an…
We study a cooperative network with a buffer-aided multi-antenna source, multiple half-duplex (HD) buffer-aided relays and a single destination. Such a setup could represent a cellular downlink scenario, in which the source can be a more powerful wireless device with a buffer and multiple antennas, while a set of intermediate less powerful devices are used as relays to reach the destination. The main target is to recover the multiplexing loss of the network by having the source and a relay to simultaneously transmit their information to another relay and the destination, respectively. Successi…
In this paper, we study a communication system consisting of three end-nodes, e.g. a single transceiver base station (BS), one transmitting and one receiving user equipments (UEs), and a common two-way relay node (RN) wherein the full-duplex BS transmits to the receiving UE in downlink direction and receives from the transmitting UE in uplink direction with the help of the intermediate full-duplex RN. We call this system model as interference two-way relay channel (ITWRC) with three end-nodes. Information theoretic bounds corresponding this system model are derived and analyzed so as to better…
The Cooperative Rate-Splitting (CRS) scheme, proposed evolves from conventional Rate Splitting (RS) and relies on forwarding a portion of the RS message by the relaying users. In terms of secrecy enhancement, it has been shown that CRS outperforms its non-cooperative counterpart for a two-user Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) Broadcast Channel (BC). Given the massive connectivity requirement of 6G, we have generalized the existing secure two-user CRS framework to the multi-user framework, where the highest-security users must be selected as the relay nodes. This paper addresses the problem …
This paper proposes a hybrid-relaying scheme empowered by a self-sustainable intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in a wireless powered communication network (WPCN), to simultaneously improve the performance of downlink energy transfer (ET) from a hybrid access point (HAP) to multiple users and uplink information transmission (IT) from users to the HAP. We propose time-switching (TS) and power-splitting (PS) schemes for the IRS, where the IRS can harvest energy from the HAP's signals by switching between energy harvesting and signal reflection in the TS scheme or adjusting its reflection ampli…
This paper studies the downlink of a cloud radio access network (C-RAN) in which a centralized processor (CP) communicates with mobile users through base stations (BSs) that are connected to the CP via finite-capacity fronthaul links. Information theoretically, the downlink of a C-RAN is modeled as a two-hop broadcast-relay network. Among the various transmission and relaying strategies for such model, this paper focuses on the compression strategy, in which the CP centrally encodes the signals to be broadcasted jointly by the BSs, then compresses and sends these signals to the BSs through the…
In this paper, the performance of a power domain downlink multiple-input multiple-output non-orthogonal multiple access system in dual-hop full-duplex (FD) relaying networks is investigated over Nakagami-$m$ fading channels by considering the channel estimation error and feedback delay. Particularly, in the investigated system, the base station equipped with multiple antennas transmits information to all mobile users by applying conventional transmit antenna selection/Alamouti-space-time block coding scheme with the help of a dedicated FD amplify-and-forward relay. The received signals at mobi…
We propose a cellular architecture that combines multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) downlink with opportunistic use of unlicensed ISM bands to establish device-to-device (D2D) cooperation. The architecture consists of a physical-layer cooperation scheme based on forming downlink virtual MIMO channels through D2D relaying, and a novel resource allocation strategy for such D2D-enabled networks. We prove the approximate optimality of the physical-layer scheme, and demonstrate that such cooperation boosts the effective SNR of the weakest user in the system, especially in the many-user regime, due to multius…
Uplink-downlink duality refers to the fact that under a sum-power constraint, the capacity regions of a Gaussian multiple-access channel and a Gaussian broadcast channel with Hermitian transposed channel matrices are identical. This paper generalizes this result to a cooperative cellular network, in which remote access-points are deployed as relays in serving the users under the coordination of a central processor (CP). In this model, the users and the relays are connected over noisy wireless links, while the relays and the CP are connected over noiseless but rate-limited fronthaul links. Base…
A downlink single-input single-output non-orthogonal multiple access setting is considered, in which a base station (BS) is communicating with two legitimate users in two possible scenarios of unsecure environments: existence of an external eavesdropper and communicating through an untrusted relay. For the first scenario, a number of trusted cooperative half-duplex relays is employed to assist with the BS's transmission and secure its signals from the external eavesdropper. Various relaying schemes are proposed and analyzed for that matter: cooperative jamming, decode-and-forward, and amplify-…
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) have drawn considerable attention recently due to their controllable scattering elements that are able to direct electromagnetic waves into desirable directions. Although RISs share some similarities with relays, the two have fundamental differences impacting their performance. To harness the benefits of both relaying and RISs, a multi-user communication system is proposed in this paper wherein a relay and an RIS cooperate to improve performance in terms of energy efficiency. Using singular value decomposition (SVD), semidefinite programming (SDP), and…
Cellular networks are evolving towards dense deployment of small cells. This in turn demands flexible and efficient backhauling solutions. A viable solution that reuses the same spectrum is wireless backhaul where the Small Base Station (SBS) acts as a relay. In this paper we consider a reference system that uses wired backhaul and each Mobile Station (MS) in the small cell has its uplink and downlink rates defined. The central question is: if we remove the wired backhaul, how much extra power should the wireless backhaul use in order to support the same uplink/downlink rates? We introduce the…
Earlier definitions of capacity for wireless networks, e.g., transport or transmission capacity, for which exact theoretical results are known, are well suited for ad hoc networks but are not directly applicable for cellular wireless networks, where large-scale basestation (BS) coordination is not possible, and retransmissions/ARQ under the SINR model is a universal feature. In this paper, cellular wireless networks, where both BS locations and mobile user (MU) locations are distributed as independent Poisson point processes are considered, and each MU connects to its nearest BS. With ARQ, und…
A Relay Station (RS) uses a buffer to store and process the received data packets before forwarding them. Recently, the buffer has been exploited in one-way relaying to opportunistically schedule the two different links according to their channel quality. The intuition is that, if the channel to the destination is poor, then RS stores more data from the source, in order to use it when the channel to the destination is good. We apply this intuition to the case of half-duplex two-way relaying, where the interactions among the buffers and the links become more complex. We investigate the sum-rate…
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is regarded as a candidate radio access technique for the next generation wireless networks because of its manifold spectral gains. A two-phase cooperative relaying strategy (CRS) is proposed in this paper by exploiting the concept of both downlink and uplink NOMA (termed as DU-CNOMA). In the proposed protocol, a transmitter considered as a source transmits a NOMA composite signal consisting of two symbols to the destination and relay during the first phase, following the principle of downlink NOMA. In the second phase, the relay forwards the symbol decode…
Cooperative technology is expected to have a great impact on the performance of cellular or, more generally, infrastructure networks. Both multicell processing (cooperation among base stations) and relaying (cooperation at the user level) are currently being investigated. In this presentation, recent results regarding the performance of multicell processing and user cooperation under the assumption of limited-capacity interbase station and inter-user links, respectively, are reviewed. The survey focuses on related results derived for non-fading uplink and downlink channels of simple cellular s…
This paper considers a relay-assisted bidirectional cellular network where the base station (BS) communicates with each mobile station (MS) using OFDMA for both uplink and downlink. The goal is to improve the overall system performance by exploring the full potential of the network in various dimensions including user, subcarrier, relay, and bidirectional traffic. In this work, we first introduce a novel three-time-slot time-division duplexing (TDD) transmission protocol. This protocol unifies direct transmission, one-way relaying and network-coded two-way relaying between the BS and each MS. …
This paper presents a downlink reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted half-duplex (HD) cooperative rate splitting multiple access (C-RSMA) networks. The proposed system model is built up considering one base station (BS), one RIS, and two users. With the goal of minimizing the network energy consumption, a joint framework to optimize the precoding vectors at the BS, common stream split, relaying device transmit power, the time slot allocation, and the passive beamforming at the RIS subject to the power budget constraints at both the BS and the relaying node, the quality of service (…
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) have drawn considerable attention recently due to their controllable scattering elements that are able to direct electromagnetic waves into desirable directions. Although RISs share some similarities with relays, the two have fundamental differences impacting their performance. To harness the benefits of both relaying and RISs, a multi-user communication system is proposed in this paper wherein a relay and an RIS cooperate to improve performance in terms of energy efficiency. To utilize the RIS efficiently, the discrete phase shifts of the RIS elements…
This paper studies user cooperation in the emerging wireless powered communication network (WPCN) for throughput optimization. For the purpose of exposition, we consider a two-user WPCN, in which one hybrid access point (H-AP) broadcasts wireless energy to two distributed users in the downlink (DL) and the users transmit their independent information using their individually harvested energy to the H-AP in the uplink (UL) through time-division-multiple-access (TDMA). We propose user cooperation in the WPCN where the user which is nearer to the H-AP and has a better channel for DL energy harves…
Energy-efficient communication is an important requirement for mobile relay networks due to the limited battery power of user terminals. This paper considers energy-efficient relaying schemes through selection of mobile relays in cooperative cellular systems with asymmetric traffic. The total energy consumption per information bit of the battery-powered terminals, i.e., the mobile station (MS) and the relay, is derived in theory. In the Joint Uplink and Downlink Relay Selection (JUDRS) scheme we proposed, the relay which minimizes the total energy consumption is selected. Additionally, the ene…
Two-way relaying can improve spectral efficiency in two-user cooperative communications. It also has great potential in multiuser systems. A major problem of designing a multiuser two-way relay system (MU-TWRS) is transceiver or precoding design to suppress co-channel interference. This paper aims to study linear precoding designs for a cellular MU-TWRS where a multi-antenna base station (BS) conducts bi-directional communications with multiple mobile stations (MSs) via a multi-antenna relay station (RS) with amplify-and-forward relay strategy. The design goal is to optimize uplink performance…
This work considers the smart repeater network where a single source $s$ wants to send two independent packet streams to destinations $\{d_1,d_2\}$ with the help of relay $r$. The transmission from $s$ or $r$ is modeled by packet erasure channels: For each time slot, a packet transmitted by $s$ may be received, with some probabilities, by a random subset of $\{d_1,d_2,r\}$; and those transmitted by $r$ will be received by a random subset of $\{d_1,d_2\}$. Interference is avoided by allowing at most one of $\{s,r\}$ to transmit in each time slot. One example of this model is any cellular networ…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to be an important new class of users in the fifth generation (5G) and beyond 5G cellular networks. In particular, there are emerging UAV applications such as aerial photograph and data relaying that require high-speed communications between the UAVs and the ground base stations (GBSs). Due to the high UAV altitude, the strong line-of-sight (LoS) links generally dominate the channels between the UAVs and GBSs, which brings both opportunities and challenges in the design of future wireless networks supporting both terrestrial and aerial users. Althou…
In this paper, cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (C-NOMA) is considered in short packet communications with finite blocklength (FBL) codes. The performance of a decode-and-forward (DF) relaying along with selection combining (SC) and maximum ratio combining (MRC) strategies at the receiver side is examined. We explore joint user pairing and resource allocation to maximize fair throughput in a downlink (DL) scenario. In each pair, the user with a stronger channel (strong user) acts as a relay for the other one (weak user), and optimal power and blocklength are allocated to achieve max-…
In this paper, we consider an indoor downlink dual-hop hybrid visible light communication (VLC)/radio frequency (RF) scenario. For each transmission block, we dynamically allocate a portion of time resources to VLC and the other portion to RF transmission. In the first phase (i.e., VLC transmission), the LED carries both data and energy to an energy harvester relay node. In the second phase (i.e., RF communication), the relay utilizes the harvested energy to re-transmit the decoded information to the far RF user. During this phase, the LED continues to transmit power (no information) to the re…
