Air-to-Ground Integrated Internet of Vehicles Enhanced by LAPSs and RISs: Location, Power, and Phase Shift Optimization

As an important part of Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been widely used in traffic intersection control, automatic driving, intelligent navigation, etc. However, due to the dynamic topology and high mobility, IoV faces the challenge of frequent disconnections, which will lead to deterioration in the performance of data dissemination. Motivated by the above, air-to-ground (A2G) integrated IoV is used to bridge the communication gaps between terrestrial vehicles to achieve efficient information transmissions. This article investigates the application of low-altitude platform stations (LAPSs) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) in A2G integrated IoV, where multiple relaying LAPSs equipped with RISs are adopted to improve the spatial multiplexing gain and create the smart radio environment. To make full use of the advantages of LAPS-and-RIS enhanced transmissions, we formulate a weighted sum rate (WSR) maximization problem by jointly considering the location, power, and phase shift. To tackle this challenging nonconvex problem, we design an iterative optimization scheme, where three optimization variables are processed in turn. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed WSR maximization scheme can significantly improve the communication performance in comparison with other state-of-the-art schemes and the baseline scheme.