Intelligent Surfaces Aided High-Mobility Communications: Opportunities and Design Issues

Intelligent reflecting/refracting surface (IRS) is envisioned as a promising technology to reconfigure the wireless propagation environment for enhancing communication performance by smartly controlling the signal reflection/refraction with a large number of tunable passive elements. In particular, the application of IRS in high-mobility scenarios can convert wireless channels from fast fading to slow fading, thus achieving more reliable communications. In this article, we first provide an overview of the new applications and opportunities of IRS in high-mobility communications. Next, we present two practical strategies for deploying IRS to aid high-mobility communications, namely, roadside IRS versus vehicle-side IRS and compare their different channel characteristics, handover requirements, and deployment costs. Then, the main issues in designing IRS-aided high-mobility communications, including node discovery, mode switching, beam alignment/tracking, handover, and multiuser scheduling, are discussed for both IRS deployment strategies. Moreover, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the potential performance gains of IRSs in vehicular communications. Finally, new research directions are pointed out for future work.