Detecting Approaching sources in Infrastructure-Less Vehicular Communications by a Simple Signal Processing Method

This work presents a new low-cost test to detect approaching sources, for possible application to inter-vehicular communications. We focus on infrastructure-less vehicular communications, where GPS and other distance vector-based networks are not employed. In fact, here we only need a cheap radio transmitter/receiver. In the proposed testing procedure, the only signs of the difference between the envelope samples of the received signal are used. The testing variable is obtained under the constant false alarm rate criterion, according to the binomial statistical distribution. The performance of the test in terms of probability of detection is evaluated versus SNR, speed, and distance between transmitter and receiver. We have evidenced the effectiveness of our solution, being independent of both the motion and propagation models.