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.
Highlights
Listening to Alexander Lautz from Deutsche Telekom, the device that, 10 years we will look back at as the device of the 5G era, will be the car [1]
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 generation vehicular use cases, such as cooperative driving and vulnerable road users (VRUs) detection
Different wireless access technologies are running to come on the market of connected vehicles for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications [6,7]: on the one hand, the old fashioned IEEE 802.11p is only waiting for a mandatory and clear business model to be installed on board of all new vehicles [8,9] and, on the other hand, the newer cellular-V2X (C-V2X) proposed by 3GPP Release 14 is rushing into things promising better coverage, higher throughput and lower latency with respect to its competitor [10,11]
Summary
Listening to Alexander Lautz from Deutsche Telekom, the device that, 10 years we will look back at as the device of the 5G era, will be the car [1]. Researchers from both the academical world and the industrial one, are proposing new solutions to smarten up the cities, starting from the street, buildings and citizen themselves [1] This includes sensors embedded in the roadway [22], wireless access technologies on traffic lights or lamps along the roads [23], vehicular social networks [24], vehicles’ routing [25,26,27], management of vehicular communication [28,29], cameras, smart wearable devices, etc. In spite of the huge effort in this direction, there will still scenarios in which the communication is obstructed by strong obstacles, preventing good links and allowing poor performance in terms of data rate, error rate, coverage and latency In this context, reconfigurable meta-surfaces can play an active role, opportunistically redirecting the radio waves to improve connectivity and enabling the establishing of new and potentially stronger links [32].
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