Adaptive Frame Structure Design for Sensing-Assisted Downlink Communication in the Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Scenario

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) is considered a key factor in driving the future development of intelligent transport, which requires high-quality communication and fast sensing of vehicle information in high-speed mobile scenarios. However, high-speed mobility makes the wireless channel change rapidly, which requires frequent channel estimation and channel feedback between a vehicle and the roadside unit (RSU), resulting in an increase in communication overhead. At the same time, the high maneuverability of vehicles leads to frequent switching and misalignment of communication beams, so the RSU must have better beam prediction and tracking capabilities. To address this problem, this paper proposes an adaptive frame structure design scheme for sensing-assisted downlink (DL) communication. The basic idea of the scheme involves analyzing the communication model during the vehicle's movement. This analysis aims to establish a theoretical relationship between the Symbol Error Rate (SER) and the following two key factors: the vehicle's starting position and the distance it travels across. Subsequently, the scheme leverages the vehicle's position data, as detected by the RSU, to calculate the real-time SER for DL communication. The SER threshold is set based on the requirements of DL communication. If the real-time SER is below this threshold, channel estimation becomes unnecessary. This decreases the frequency of channel estimation and frees up time and frequency resources that would otherwise be occupied by channel estimation processes within the frame structure. The design of an adaptive frame structure, as detailed in the above scheme, is presented. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed method is analyzed and compared with that of the traditional communication protocol frame structure and the beam prediction-based frame structure. The simulation results indicate that the communication throughput of the proposed method can be improved by up to 6% compared with the traditional communication protocol frame structure while maintaining SER performance.