Physical Layer Security for V2I Communications: Reflecting Surfaces Vs. Relaying

Wireless vehicular network (WVN) is exponentially gaining attention from industries and researchers since it is the keystone of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Despite the sophisticated features and services that it can offer, it is susceptible to networking attacks such as eavesdropping threats where the confidential transmitted signal could be overheard by a malicious entity. In this paper, we intend to study the physical layer security (PLS) where we consider the eavesdropping attack for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. We analyze the average secrecy capacity, under different scenarios by comparing the performances of employing the decode-and-forward (DF) relay, the amplify-and-forward fixed gain (AFFG) relay, and the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). Actually, this comparison investigates the efficiency of IRS comparing to the traditional relaying systems, since it was introduced as a novel paradigm in wireless technology with highly promising potential, especially in 5G and 6G.