Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Centralized Scheduling for mmWave V2V Networks

In this paper, we investigate how to efficiently schedule vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) requests in millimeter wave (mmWave) vehicular networks. Considering the vulnerability of mmWave signals to blockages and the disadvantages of traditional relay mode, we firstly propose the cooperation of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) and relays to enable the scheduling of non-line-of-sight (NLOS) requests. To maximize the resource utilization and consequently improve the success ratio of link scheduling, we design a centralized scheduling algorithm based on spatial-time division multiple access (STDMA) and the cooperation scheme. The proposed algorithm can provide more opportunities for scheduling NLOS requests by the cooperation of IRSs and relays, and achieve the goal of collision-free concurrent transmissions by fully leveraging spatial reuse, so that as many V2V requests as possible can be fulfilled. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively enhance the success ratio of scheduling V2V requests especially NLOS requests.