The Use of Meta-Surfaces in Vehicular Networks

Abstract

Mobility as a service is becoming a new paradigm in the direction of travel planning on the basis of the best service offered by the travelled roads. Hence, the environment in which people move will become smarter and more and more connected to grant services along the whole path. This opens new challenges related not only to the on board connectivity and wireless access technologies, but also on the reliability and efficiency of the surrounding environment. In this context, reconfigurable meta-surfaces play a crucial role, since they can be used to coat buildings, vehicles or any other suitable surfaces and let the environment become an active part of the communication system by opportunistically redirecting (i.e., reflecting, without generating new waves) signals to the target receivers. The objective of this paper is to highlight the limits of current wireless access technologies for vehicular scenarios and to discuss the potential impact of a smart environment made of reconfigurable meta-surfaces on some next generation vehicular use cases, such as cooperative driving and vulnerable road users (VRUs) detection. In addition, a preliminary model is presented to derive, in a simplified way, the performance of an IEEE 802.11p network in terms of collision probability. Even if analytical and based on simplified assumptions, this model has been validated through simulations and allows to compare the performance of the network with and without reconfigurable meta-surfaces.

Radiation Pattern Prediction for Metasurfaces: A Neural Network-Based Approach

“…Therefore, by learning this relationship between the reconfiguration profile and the MSF response, we can manipulate the radiation pattern to optimize the communication channel. Moreover, free space RIS was the subject of several recent works such as free space optical systems [ 66 ], smart radio environments [ 67 , 68 , 69 ], vehicular communication systems [ 70 , 71 ], and a line of sight wireless communications [ 5 ]. Regardless of the actual characteristics of the source (e.g., horn antenna), far-field impinging waves upon the MSF can be considered to be locally planar [ 69 ].…”

On the Design of Sidelink for Cellular V2X: A Literature Review and Outlook for Future

“…In coverage-limited scenarios also due to harsh propagation conditions, e.g., at an obstructed intersection, the exploitation of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can improve packet reception [171], for both V2V and V2I links. With specific reference to the sidelink interface, we can expect such improvements also to benefit the sensingbased approach of the autonomous mode, poorly behaving at intersections, as demonstrated in the surveyed literature.…”

Review of Autonomous Intelligent Vehicles for Urban Driving and Parking

“…Measurement data will be shared by means of V2V to enable better environmental awareness. The fusion of ADAS and smart-lighting infrastructures can be deployed using radar-camera-based traffic-monitoring devices [121] and low-cost global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers [122], together with microscale traffic information and other networks [123][124][125][126].…”