Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is on its way to becoming the biggest player in the coming-of-age transportation system. However, the sheer demand for the enormous amount of data to secure seamless connectivity and functioning with maximum speed and safety tends to increase the power consumption of the ITS. Dr Sunil Chinnadurai and his PhD scholar Mr Shaik Rajak from the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering present Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (IRS) as the key enabling technology to provide the data required by the ITS with less power consumption.
Their article “Deep Learning Enabled IRS for 6G Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Comprehensive Study” which makes a comprehensive study on the DL-enabled IRS-aided ITS was published in the esteemed journal ‘IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems’ having an Impact factor of 6.5. The article elucidates the ways and means to overcome the channel estimation, secrecy rate, and energy efficiency optimisation problems.
The research suggests that connecting ITS to wireless networks via IRS will help in reaching the destination within the stipulated time duration with enhanced safety and comfort. Besides highlighting the reduced power consumption and hardware cost of the DL-enabled IRS-aided ITS, the article also projects that IRS usage in 6G-ITS massively helps the traffic control system to precisely send and receive the information of school buses as well as healthcare vehicles like ambulances, fire safety vehicles, etc. Their future research plans also include the experimental analysis of energy efficiency for wireless networks and Intelligent Transportation Systems with IRS.
Abstract of the Research
Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) play an increasingly significant role in our life, where safe and effective vehicular networks supported by sixth generation (6G) communication technologies are the essence of ITS. Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications need to be studied to implement ITS in a secure, robust, and efficient manner, allowing massive connectivity in vehicular communications networks. Besides, with the rapid growth of different types of autonomous vehicles, it becomes challenging to facilitate the heterogeneous requirements of ITS. To meet the above needs, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) are introduced to vehicular communications and ITS, containing the reflecting elements that can intelligently configure incident signals from and to vehicles. As a novel vehicular communication paradigm at its infancy, it is key to understand the latest research efforts on applying IRS to 6G ITS as well as the fundamental differences with other existing alternatives and the new challenges brought by implementing IRS in 6G ITS. In this paper, we provide a big picture of deep learning enabled IRS for 6G ITS and appraise most of the important literature in this field. By appraising and summarizing the existing literature, we also point out the challenges and worthwhile research directions related to IRS aided 6G ITS.