AIRS-assisted Vehicular Networks with Rate-Splitting SWIPT Receivers: Joint Trajectory and Communication Design

In this correspondence, we propose to use an intelligent reflective surface (IRS) installed on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), referred to as aerial IRS (AIRS), for vehicular networks, where simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) receivers to concurrently allow information decoding (ID) and energy harvesting (EH) are equipped at the battery-limited vehicles. For efficiently supporting the multiple moving vehicles, we adopt rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) technique. With the aim of maximizing the sum rate of vehicles, we jointly optimize trajectory and phase shift design of AIRS, transmit power and rate allocation for RSMA along with power splitting ratio for SWIPT implementation. Via simulations, the superior performances of the proposed algorithm are validated compared to the conventional partial optimizations.