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Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has recently received much attention
from the research community due to its potential to achieve high spectral and
power efficiency cost-effectively. In addition to traditional cellular
networks, the use of IRS in vehicular networks is also considered. Prior works
on IRS-aided vehicle-to-everything communications focus on deploying reflection
surfaces on the facades of buildings along the road for sidelink performance
enhancement. This paper goes beyond the state of the art by presenting a novel
paradigm coined Intelligent Reflecting Vehicle Surface (IRVS). It embeds a
massive number of reflection elements on vehicles' surfaces to aid moving
vehicular networks in military and emergency communications. We propose an
alternative optimization method to optimize jointly active beamforming at the
base station and passive reflection across multiple randomly-distributed
vehicle surfaces. Performance evaluation in terms of sum spectral efficiency
under continuous, discrete, and random phase shifts is conducted. Numerical
results reveal that IRVS can substantially improve the capacity of a moving
vehicular network.
