Intelligent Reflecting Vehicle Surface: A Novel IRS Paradigm for Moving Vehicular Networks

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has recently received much attention from the research community due to its potential to achieve high spectral and power efficiency cost-effectively. In addition to traditional cellular networks, the use of IRS in vehicular networks is also considered. Prior works on IRS-aided vehicle-to-everything communications focus on deploying reflection surfaces on the facades of buildings along the road for sidelink performance enhancement. This paper goes beyond the state of the art by presenting a novel paradigm coined Intelligent Reflecting Vehicle Surface (IRVS). It embeds a massive number of reflection elements on vehicles' surfaces to aid moving vehicular networks in military and emergency communications. We propose an alternative optimization method to optimize jointly active beamforming at the base station and passive reflection across multiple randomly-distributed vehicle surfaces. Performance evaluation in terms of sum spectral efficiency under continuous, discrete, and random phase shifts is conducted. Numerical results reveal that IRVS can substantially improve the capacity of a moving vehicular network.