Two-Way Reliable Forwarding Strategy of RIS Symbiotic Communications for Vehicular Named Data Networks

Upon the spreading of intelligent transportation technology, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) can be applied in traditional vehicular networks to assist autonomous driving, so as to deal with blind spots and high energy consumption of long-distance communication in vehicles communication system. However, achieving bidirectional reliable communication for vehicular networks is challenging because of the high mobility of vehicles. The existing solution relies on constantly reconstructing end-to-end communication links for bidirectional communication in vehicular networks. Moreover, waiting timers on the data transmission path can double the transmission delay for data return, not to mention the potential communication delays and overheads triggered by the rapid movement of the vehicle. In order to avoid those tricky situations, this article proposes a novel two-way reliable forwarding strategy (TRFS) for vehicular named data networks and adopts the RIS symbiotic communication scheme to further reduce the transmission overhead, which has the ability to establish and maintain a reliable end-to-end communication link. On the one hand, the crucial insight of the proposed TRFS is to achieve low delay by eliminating wait timers on the data return path. Specifically, a topology-free policy is used to reduce transmission overhead and to accommodate sudden changes in network topology. On the other hand, the proposed RIS-assisted symbiotic communication scheme expands the coverage of vehicle communication and acts as a relay to compensate for the energy consumption from the long-distance transmission. Moreover, we also investigate the reliability of the proposed TRFS in vehicle communication under various vehicle densities, vehicle communication distances, and speed variations. The experiments show that the proposed TRFS scheme outperforms the classic listen first broadcast last (LFBL) fast-forwarding strategy and the novel reinforcement-based lightweight forwarding (R-LF) strategy in terms of transmission overhead, satisfaction rate, and average delay. The results reiterates the proposed RIS-assisted scheme’s ability to further reduce the transmission overhead of vehicles communication.