Outage Performance of RIS-Assisted V2I Communications With Inter-Cell Interference

With the ability of enhancing desired signals, Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) is expected to be applied to vehicular networks which require ultra-reliable communications. In this letter we propose a promising RIS-assisted vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) network model in highway environment. Then under Rayleigh fading channels, our goal is to derive the downlink outage probability (OP) of the proposed V2I system with considering the inter-cell interference, i.e., interference from neighbor road side units (RSUs) and RISs. To achieve this intractable derivation, the probability density functions (PDFs) of desired signal power and interference-plus noise power are calculated by leveraging Gauss-Chebyshev quadrature and moment matching. Numerical results verify the accuracy of our derivation and it is shown that RISs can enhance the desired signal with causing little interference to neighbor cells, so that the OP of V2I communications can be greatly reduced.

I. Introduction

In recent years vehicular communication has catched much attention due to its appealing potential in the perception of real-time traffic conditions. In General, vehicular communication is reliability-sensitive, due to the fact that the outage of communications may lead to incomplete delivery of traffic information and therefore impacting road safety. The reliability performance of general vehicular communication systems has been well investigated [1], [2]. The existing researches all manifest that the reliability of vehicular communications can be satisfactory only in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Hence, it is necessary to manage to enhance desired signals when SNR is low due to poor wireless environment or long communication distance.