Performance Analysis of Hybrid RF/VLC Energy Harvested Terrestrial-Underwater System

Abstract

In this paper, we study the performance analysis of a cooperative terrestrial-underwater visible light communication (UWVLC) system, considering energy harvesting at a decode and forward (DF) relay on the ship. The transmitter to the ship link is modelled by shadowed Rician fading channel, while the UWVLC link is characterised by mixture exponential generalized gamma (EGG) distribution. The energy constrained relay harvests energy from the received signal based on power splitting (PS) scheme, assuming a part of received power is used for energy harvesting. Energy harvesting at the relay node makes the system sustainable by reducing the carbon footprints. We derive novel closed form expressions for bit error rate (BER), outage probability and ergodic capacity for the considered system at the underwater node, considering the effects of various parameters that include bubble level, temperature and salinity.