Cooperative Spectrum Management in Cognitive Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In recent years, Cognitive Radio (CR) technology has received significant attention from the research community as it enables on-demand spectrum utilization, based on the requests of the end-users. An interesting application area of CR technology is Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). In such networks, several innovative services and applications based on inter-vehicular communication have strict requirements in terms of bandwidth and delay, which might not be guaranteed by a fixed spectrum allocation paradigm. In this paper, we propose two key contributions pertaining to CR-VANETs: (i) an experimental study of the spectrum availability and sensing accuracy in a moving vehicle and (ii) a collaborative spectrum management framework (called Cog-V2V), which allows the vehicles to share spectrum information, and to detect spectrum opportunities in the licensed band. As part of this framework, we design a collaborative sensing and decision algorithm, enabling the vehicles to share spectrum information and to know in advance the spectrum availability at future locations along their motion paths. The simulation results, produced through a novel integrated simulation platform for CR networks, reveal significant improvements of Cog-V2V in sensing accuracy and pair-wise communication performance compared to classical fixed spectrum approaches.