Blind spectrum sensing in cognitive vehicular ad hoc networks over Nakagami-m fading channels

Abstract

Exploiting cognitive radio (CR) technology in intelligent transportations systems have recently attracted a significant attention from the research communities. In particular, we study cooperative vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) which are considered as an important application of CR. Spectrum sensing is a crucial task in CR applications. However, fading propagation channels can significantly limit the sensing performance. Thus, great efforts are made to model the fading and shadowing channel characteristics in CR-VANET. Indeed, experimental measurements have shown that the 5.9 GHz dedicated short range communication narrow-bad allocated to VANET is characterized with Nakagami distribution. Thus, blind eigenvalues-based spectrum sensing methods are appropriate in high fading environments. In this paper, we investigate blind detection in cooperative CR-VANET over Nakagami-m fading channels. The results reveal the great impact of fading channel characteristics and their severity on spectrum sensing performance. Besides, several cases of interest are examined such as the impact of fading factor, CR-vehicles number, samples number, etc.