Internet-of-vehicle (IoV) is a general concept referring to, e.g., autonomous drive based vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications or moving relays. Here, high rate and reliability demands call for advanced multi-antenna techniques and millimeter-wave (mmw) based communications. However, the sensitivity of the mmw signals to blockage may limit the system performance, especially in highways/rural areas with limited building reflectors/base station deployments and high-speed devices. To avoid the blockage, various techniques have been proposed among which reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a candidate. RIS, however, has been mainly of interest in stationary/low mobility scenarios, due to the associated channel state information acquisition and beam management overhead as well as imperfect reflection. In this article, we study the potentials and challenges of RIS-assisted dynamic blockage avoidance in IoV networks. Particularly, by designing region-based RIS pre-selection as well as blockage prediction schemes, we show that RIS-assisted communication has the potential to boost the performance of IoV networks. However, there are still issues to be solved before RIS can be practically deployed in IoV networks.

翻译：车联网（IoV）是一个广义概念，涵盖基于自动驾驶的车联万物（V2X）通信或移动中继等场景。在此类应用中，高数据速率与高可靠性需求催生了先进多天线技术及毫米波通信方案。然而，毫米波信号对阻塞的敏感性可能制约系统性能，尤其是在高速公路/农村等建筑物反射体稀疏、基站部署有限且存在高速移动设备的场景中。为规避阻塞问题，业界提出了多种技术方案，其中可重构智能表面（RIS）成为候选方案之一。但由于信道状态信息获取与波束管理开销大，加之反射不完善等问题，现有研究主要关注RIS在静止/低速移动场景中的应用。本文研究了RIS辅助车联网动态阻塞规避的潜力与挑战。通过设计基于区域划分的RIS预选方案及阻塞预测机制，我们证明RIS辅助通信能够有效提升车联网性能。然而，RIS在车联网中的实际部署仍存在若干亟待解决的问题。