High-Rate Uninterrupted Internet of Vehicle Communications in Highways: Dynamic Blockage Avoidance and CSIT Acquisition

In future wireless networks, one of the use cases of interest is the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Here, IoV refers to two different functionalities, namely, serving the in-vehicle users and supporting the connected-vehicle functionalities, where both can be well provided by the transceivers installed on top of vehicles. Such dual functionality of on-vehicle transceivers implies strict rate and reliability requirements, for which one may need to communicate at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies. However, IoV communication at mmWave requires up-to-date channel state information (CSI) and blockage avoidance. In this article, we incorporate the recently proposed concept of predictor antennas (PAs) into a large-scale cooperative PA (LSCPA) setup where both temporal blockages and CSI out-dating are avoided via base stations (BSs)/vehicles cooperation. Summarizing the ongoing standardization progress enabling IoV communications, we present the potential and challenges of the LSCPA setup, and compare the effect of cooperative and non-cooperative schemes on the performance of IoV links. As we show, BS cooperation and blockage/CSI prediction can boost the performance of IoV links remarkably.