Relay Cooperative Vehicular Communication System: RIS-Equipped RF Source With Different Types of Forwarding Method

With the continuous advancement of wireless technologies, the design of cost-effective and efficient communication solutions to support large-scale Internet of Vehicles (IoV) systems has become increasingly critical. Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS), a cutting-edge technology in wireless communication, presents a promising solution to this challenge. This paper focuses on leveraging RIS to address the key obstacles encountered in vehicle communication. We propose an IoV communication system in which RIS is employed as the transmitter, operating under Nakagami-m fading channels. The basic system model consists of a radio frequency (RF) transmitter and an RIS, both serving as the transmission source. The signal is transmitted to a relay, which subsequently forwards it to multi-antenna-equipped vehicles via an amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme. We provide a thorough performance analysis of the system, deriving expressions for the outage probability and the average channel capacity. Furthermore, we validate the theoretical results through extensive simulations. Our findings suggest that RIS has the potential to significantly enhance the performance of IoV systems.