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

TL;DR

This paper compares the effectiveness of reflecting surfaces and relaying techniques in enhancing physical layer security for vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, highlighting IRS as a promising new technology.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of IRS and traditional relaying methods for improving secrecy capacity in V2I networks.

Findings

IRS outperforms traditional relays in secrecy capacity

Reflecting surfaces offer a promising alternative for secure V2I communications

The study highlights the potential of IRS in 5G and 6G networks

Abstract

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 (D 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.