Joint Beamformer Design and Power Allocation Method for Hybrid RF-VLCP System

In this article, a hybrid radio frequency-visible light communication and positioning (RF-VLCP) system is designed, which can support high-data rate communication and high accuracy positioning with good energy efficiency (EE) performance. The hybrid system uses two links for downlink communication, namely, radio frequency (RF) and visible light communication (VLC) links, and employs visible light positioning (VLP) technology for positioning. Furthermore, an optimization problem is developed to allocate power for VLC and VLP links and to design beamformer for the RF transmitter. By doing so, the EE of the hybrid system is maximized while the Cramer–Rao Lower bound (CRLB) of the positioning error and the minimum data rate of the communication are guaranteed. A two-step algorithm is proposed to tackle the formulated optimization problem, which first determines the power allocation of the VLP signal and then obtains the power allocation of the VLC signal and the beamformer of the RF transmitter. Numerical results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed two-step algorithm over the existing algorithm in terms of computation speed. In addition, the EE performance of the hybrid system is evaluated under different data rate and positioning accuracy requirements. Besides, we also show that the hybrid RF-VLCP system is more energy efficient compared to standalone RF and VLP technologies.