Rate-Power Trade-Off in Simultaneous Lightwave Information and Power Transfer Systems

In this letter, we study the fundamental trade-off that exists between the power harvested and data rate supported by a simultaneous lightwave information and power transmission (SLIPT) receiver. By selecting the DC operating point of the photovoltaic cell using a power converter, the receiver can be tuned to optimize collected power or data rate. Utilizing an electrical model of a photovoltaic cell, an expression for the bandwidth and a lower bound on the rate is derived as function of its DC terminal voltage. Using this dependency, a novel adaptive-SLIPT receiver is developed where the rate-power trade-off is quantified for the first time. Finally, we propose and study an optimization problem to find the optimum operating voltage of the photovoltaic cell to obtain a desired trade-off between the data rate and harvested power for a given battery charge state and incident irradiance.