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

TL;DR

This paper explores high-rate, uninterrupted IoV communications at millimeter wave frequencies on highways, utilizing cooperative predictor antennas to mitigate blockages and outdated channel information, thereby enhancing link reliability and performance.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale cooperative predictor antenna framework for IoV, combining blockage avoidance and CSI prediction to improve mmWave communication robustness.

Findings

Cooperative BSs and predictor antennas significantly improve IoV link performance.

The LSCPA setup effectively mitigates blockage and CSI outdating issues.

Cooperative schemes outperform non-cooperative ones in high-mobility scenarios.

Abstract

In future wireless networks, one of the use-cases of interest is 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 (mmW) frequencies. However, IoV communication at mmW 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 potentials 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, BSs cooperation and blockage/CSI prediction can boost the performance of IoV links remarkably.