The effect of Savitzky-Golay smoothing filter on the performance of a vehicular dynamic spectrum access method

Modern Intelligent Transportation System in order to guarantee safety and road efficiency has to implement efficient and reliable communication tech- niques. Traditional techniques are based on a client– server paradigm, needing the installation of base sta- tions and the allocation of frequency bands to be im- plemented. These solutions would require the alloca- tion of a band in several countries in order to give a re- liable service to long–distance traveling vehicles, with- out considering that nowadays the radio spectrum re- source is overcrowded. To overcome these limits the in- terest for Vehicular Dynamic Spectrum Access (VDSA) is arising. In order to accomplish this goal spectrum sensing plays a very important role. A good spectrum sensing technique makes use of smoothing filters.These filters shows different features in terms of de-noising effectiveness, computational burden, shape preserving to cite a few. In this framework, aim of the paper is to analyze the use of the Savitzky-Golay filter which has rarely been employed to smooth data in spectrum sens- ing technique. The performance of such a filter is com- pared with one attained by a much popular filter, well– known and overused in smoothing techniques, i.e. the Moving Average linear filter. The comparison is made by considering suitable figures of merit typical of cognitive radio.