Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Aided DFRC Vehicular Networks

Abstract

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) has been considered as a promising technology for 6G networks, which is capable of directionally reflecting the incident signal by adjusting phase shift of its reflecting elements, and thus to achieve beamforming. In this paper, we investigate the potential of employing RIS in dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) vehicular networks. Considering a vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication in non-line-of-sight(N-LoS) scenario, where RIS is deployed to establish sensing and communication links, we propose a scheme to optimize the beamforming based on the detected vehicle position for the sake of avoiding the relatively large channel estimation overhead. More specifically, we build a codebook to maintain the optimal phase shift of RIS corresponding to each candidate angle offline, which can be used for detecting the direction of vehicle in N-LoS scenario. In addition, the position-based channel state information (CSI) is introduced and used for maximize the downlink rate. Simulation results show that by deploying RIS in DFRC vehicular networks, the base station can detect the vehicle position in N-LoS scenario and provide it with reliable communication rates without channel estimation.