Optical IRS Aided B5G V2V Solution for Road Safety Applications

Abstract: In this work, we showcase the potential benefit of employing optical intelligent reflecting surfaces (O-IRS) for improving safety message dissemination for vehicular visible light communication (V-VLC) systems particularly at the road intersections. Buildings, roadside structures, signboards, and other impediments commonly hinder line-of-sight (LoS) communication between vehicles at urban crossroads scenarios. We propose using O-IRS at road intersection to improve the communication link's reliability. We compare the performance of proposed scheme with baseline scenarios such as optical relay and non line-of-sight (NLOS) road reflection (NRR) aided vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. From obtained results, it has been shown that O-IRS offers considerable performance enhancement as compared to the baseline scenarios. In particular, O-IRS can achieve longer communication range as compared to the optical relay aided V-VLC systems while ensuring desired quality-of-service (QoS).