Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Enabled Vehicular Networks: A Physical Layer Security Perspective

This study focuses on the physical layer security (PLS) performance of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided vehicular communication network. Motivated by the great potential of RIS-based transmission, we analyze the PLS performance of two scenarios of vehicular networks (both of which have an eavesdropper present): i) vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication when the source employs a RIS-based access point and ii) vehicular adhoc network (VANET) where a RIS-based relay mounted on a building. The performance of the proposed systems are evaluated in terms of the average secrecy capacity (ASC) and the secrecy outage probability (SOP). We present accurate analytical expressions for the two performance metrics and study the impact of various system parameters on the overall performance of the two considered system configurations. In order to validate the analysis, we provide Monte-Carlo simulations throughout the paper. The results demonstrate that the system performance is impacted by various parameters such as the number of RIS elements as well as the location of the RIS-relay. Moreover, up to an order magnitude gain could be achieved within certain regions when the number of RIS cells are doubled, clearly indicating the benefit of employing a RIS configuration.