Rate Splitting Multiple Access for Simultaneous Lightwave Information and Power Transfer

This paper initiate the application of rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) for simultaneous lightwave information and power transfer (SLIPT), where users require to decode information and harvest energy. We focus on a time-splitting (TS) mode where information decoding and energy harvesting are separated in two different phases. Based on the proposed system model, we design a constrained-concave-convex programming (CCCP) algorithm to solve the optimization problem of maximizing the worst-case rate among users subject to the harvested energy constraint at each user. Specifically, the proposed algorithm exploits transformation of the bilinear function, semidefinite relaxation (SDR), CCCP, and a penalty method to effectively deal with the non-convex constraints and objective function. Numerical results show that our proposed RSMA-aided SLIPT outperforms the existing baselines based on space-division multiple access (SDMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA).