On the Performance of Partial RIS Selection vs. Partial Relay Selection for Vehicular Communications

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has been introduced as a promising emerging paradigm to design a smart radio environment for improving wireless capacity. It has the potential to reshape wave propagation via its tunable and low-cost reflecting elements. Therefore, it is regarded as a propitious solution that provides alternative paths for the propagation of high-frequency signals, which are vulnerable to blockages and suffer from penetration losses. Because of those features, RIS has been considered to be integrated into the wireless vehicular network (WVN), which is characterized by high mobility and high quality of service (QoS) requirements. Hence, similar to relaying systems, a vehicle needs to select the best available RIS that maximizes the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver. Inspired by that, in this paper, we introduce the partial RIS selection for enhancing capacity and reducing error rate. We derive closed-form expressions for the ergodic capacity, symbol error probability (SEP), and energy efficiency for a partial RIS selection design. Besides, we compare its performances to the partial relaying design while considering: decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward fixed gain (AF). Moreover, we consider a wireless attack scenario, where an eavesdropper intends to overhear the transmitted signal at the receiver’s end. Then, we compare partial RIS to partial relay selection from this security perspective, where we derive closed-form expressions for the average secrecy capacity. Furthermore, we compare the partial RIS selection to a single RIS architecture scenario from the literature, where our solution outperforms the related existing work.