Grouping-Based and Position-Based Phase Optimization for RIS-Assisted Millimeter-Wave Vehicular Communications

Millimeter-wave vehicular communication links are prone to blockage and suffer from severe path loss, and high mobility leads to rapidly time-varying channels. In addition, large-scale reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) arrays impose substantial channel-estimation overhead and phase-optimization complexity. To address these issues, a group-based and position-aided phase-optimization method is proposed for RIS-assisted millimeter-wave vehicular communications. First, an RIS-assisted uplink system is modeled with a multi-antenna base station (BS), an RIS configured as a uniform planar array (UPA) and a single-antenna vehicular terminal. Channel expressions are formulated for the direct vehicle–BS link, the vehicle–RIS link and the RIS–BS link. Rician fading, line-of-sight (LoS)-dominated millimeter-wave propagation, mobility-induced Doppler shifts and a standardized path-loss model for urban microcell street-canyon scenarios are incorporated to characterize the RIS-assisted vehicular cascaded channel. Based on this model, an optimization problem for the RIS phase-shift matrix is formulated under discrete phase-shift constraints to maximize the achievable rate per unit bandwidth. To avoid the exponential increase in complexity caused by conventional exhaustive search as the number of RIS reflecting elements increases, a successive refinement algorithm is introduced to derive an equivalent channel-gain expression. The original phase-optimization problem is then transformed into an element-wise iterative update process, thereby reducing the computational complexity of large-scale RIS phase configuration. To further reduce the reliance on full channel state information (CSI), two low-overhead phase-optimization schemes are designed. In the group-based scheme, the RIS reflecting elements are partitioned into several subgroups, with all elements in each subgroup constrained to share the same phase shift. This design reduces both the channel-estimation dimensionality and the number of optimization variables. In the position-aided scheme, the spatial coordinates of the BS, RIS and vehicle are used to derive the link distances and the associated angles of arrival and departure. Based on these geometric parameters, the vehicle–RIS–BS cascaded channel is reconstructed and a corresponding phase-alignment strategy is designed. The simulation results demonstrate that both proposed schemes achieve rates of approximately 6.5 bits s−1Hz−1 at a transmit power of 30 dBm and outperform existing phase-optimization techniques. When the successive refinement algorithm is applied, the computation time required for phase optimization with a 256-element RIS remains below 0.01 s. Under high-mobility conditions, both proposed schemes approach the performance upper bound achieved with perfect CSI, demonstrating strong robustness to channel variations.