ENHANCING VEHICULAR COMMUNICATION NETWORKS: AN RIS-DRIVEN ELEMENT SELECTION APPROACH FOR MULTIPLE VEHICLES

Abstract

With the rapid evolution of vehicular communication technologies, Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) are being proposed to create a favorable propagation environment between the mobile vehicles and the communication infrastructure to achieve a seamless and reliable communication. In this work, we consider an RIS-aided multivehicular communication network and formulate a sum rate maximization problem. We propose to solve the maximization problem in two steps: i) by optimizing the RIS phase shifts for each vehicle using the successive refinement algorithm and ii) by proposing a novel cost metric for selecting the RIS elements dedicated to each vehicle. Further, to ensure fairness in utilizing the RIS elements for each vehicle, we propose two new algorithms, computing the number of RIS elements to be dedicated for each vehicle. Using simulations, we corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed solutions in providing a uniform achievable sum rate over a large distance under consideration.