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 techniques. Traditional techniques are based on a client- server paradigm, needing the installation of base stations and the allocation of frequency bands to be implemented. These solutions would require the allocation of a band in several countries in order to give a reliable service to long-distance traveling vehicles, without considering that nowadays the radio spectrum resource is overcrowded. To overcome these limits the interest 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 sensing technique. The performance of such a filter is compared 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.