Intelligent and Secure Radio Environments for 6G Vehicular Aided HetNets: Key Opportunities and Challenges

The main challenges in sixth-generation (6G) communication networks are connection reliability, low transmission latency, massive low-powered connectivity, and ultra-high capacity. Reconfigurable meta-surfaces are emerging as a novel and revolutionizing technology to enable intelligent wireless environments. Due to the low cost, improved efficiency, and passive nature of reflecting elements, it is becoming possible to program and control the wireless environment. Since wireless physical layer technologies can generally adapt to the wireless environment, their combination with reconfigurable surfaces and deep learning approaches can open new avenues for achieving secure 6G vehicular aided heterogeneous networks (HetNets). Motivated by these appealing advantages, this work provides an intelligent and secure radio environment (ISRE) paradigm for 6G vehicular aided HetNets. We present an overview of enabling technologies for ISRE-based 6G vehicular aided HetNets. We discuss features, design goals, and applications of such networks. Next, we outline new opportunities provided by ISRE-based 6G vehicular HetNets, and we present a case study using the contextual bandit approach in terms of best IRS for secure communications. Finally, we discuss some future research opportunities.