Dual-Hop Joint Visible Light and Backscatter Communication Relaying under Finite Blocklength

2026-02-25

AI Summary

This study addresses energy-neutral ambient Internet of Things (A-IoT) scenarios by investigating a cooperative transmission mechanism between visible light communication (VLC) and backscatter communication (BC) under finite blocklength constraints. The authors propose a dual-hop VLC-BC integrated relay architecture that leverages indoor LEDs to simultaneously provide illumination, data transmission, and optical power delivery, enabling passive backscatter devices—devoid of carrier synthesizers and power amplifiers—to forward information to RF terminals. For the first time, the end-to-end performance of this hybrid system is modeled and analyzed within a finite blocklength framework, explicitly accounting for practical interference and short-packet communication characteristics. Simulation results demonstrate that the reliability and achievable rate are significantly influenced by the backscatter device’s position, orientation, and the system’s coding rate, thereby validating the feasibility and advantages of the proposed architecture in A-IoT applications.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Computer Vision: Multi-modal Vision
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

This paper investigates a dual-hop joint visible light communication (VLC) and backscatter communication (BC) relaying framework under the finite blocklength (FBL) constraint, aiming at energy-neutral Ambient Internet of Things (A-IoT) deployments. In the proposed system, indoor LED access points are used to simultaneously provide illumination and transmit information over light to a backscatter device (BD), which harvests optical energy and backscatters the received messages to user equipments (UEs) equipped with radio frequency (RF) front ends. This forwarding of the information from VLC to RF channels is implemented without the need for carrier synthesizers and power amplifiers at the IoT node. By modeling the end-to-end communication link with short-packet IoT traffic and realistic levels of interference between adjacent VLC coverage areas, we analyze the outage performance and achievable data rate of the proposed system. Simulation results demonstrate that key factors, such as placement and orientation of the BD, as well as the selected code rate of the system affect reliability and data rate that can be achieved for communication purposes. The insights gained from this study pave the way for ambient power-enabled IoT solutions and future hybrid VLC/RF network designs.

Problem

• Visible Light Communication
• Backscatter Communication
• Finite Blocklength
• Ambient Internet of Things
• Dual-Hop Relaying

Innovation

• Visible Light Communication
• Backscatter Communication
• Finite Blocklength
• Energy-Neutral IoT
• Hybrid VLC/RF