Performance Analysis of RIS-Enhanced Secure Transmission for Symbiotic IoV Systems

With the continuous development of information and communication technology, it is critical to design novel spectrum, energy and cost-efficient wireless communication technologies to support massive Internet of Things (IoT) devices over a large area. Symbiotic communication that integrates active and passive communications has emerged as a promising technology to fulfill such demand. This paper focuses on using reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) to address the communication challenges faced by vehicles, such as data privacy concerns, network security threats, and interference issues. The key idea of symbiotic communication is to modify and reflect the incident signal from the active main transmitter. Therefore, the base model of this paper is a transmitter consisting of radio frequency (RF) signal and RIS that transmits a signal to one of the vehicles. In this process, inevitable threats of interference or eavesdropping arise. To ensure secure communication in Internet of Vehicles (IoV) systems, we establish a functional relationship between security performance of the system and variables such as the number of RIS elements and the aggregate interferences. We validate the accuracy of the analytical results through Monte Carlo simulations. Simulation outcomes demonstrate that increasing the number of RIS elements can mitigate adverse effects from aggregate interference or eavesdropping, thereby enhancing the security performance of IoV systems.