Performance Evaluation of RIS-Assisted UAV-Enabled Vehicular Communication System With Multiple Non-Identical Interferers

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has emerged as important transmission technology to improve the spectral/energy efficiency in the next-generation (beyond 5G (BSG) and 6G) wireless communication network and has numerous applications in the areas of Internet of Things (IoT) and vehicular communication systems. Thus, in this paper, we investigate the application of RIS in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled vehicular communication system with infinite and finite block length codes, where UAV communicates with the single antenna ground vehicle in the presence of several interfering vehicles on the road. We have obtained the approximate closed-form statistics of received SINR at ground vehicle in the presence of multiple nonidentical interference links. Furthermore, we analyze the performance of the considered system in terms of the coverage probability, bit-error-rate, block error rate (BLER) and goodput. It has been shown through the numerical results that the deployment of RIS significantly improves the performance of UAV-enabled vehicular communication network, even in the presence of the direct link between the UAV and the ground vehicle. Additionally, we also investigate the impact of various channel and system parameters like practical reflection coefficients of RIS, number of RIS reflecting elements, and number of interfering vehicles on the system performance. The analytical results are corroborated with Monte Carlo simulations.