Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are fundamental in order to improve safety and road efficiency. In this framework inter-vehicle communications play a primary role. To this aim several vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication standards have been developed. The most important is IEEE 802.11p that operates in ISM band (5.85-5.92) GHz. Unfortunately at these frequencies communication ranges are limited and Doppler effect could not be neglected, especially when the carrier spacing of the adopted modulation techniques is close to 1 kHz, as it happens in modern standard for digital mobile communications.
In order to overcome these issues, a possible solution could be the adoption of a dynamic spectrum access model able to identify frequency holes in UHF band. In this framework, this paper presents a novel approach to spectrum sensing based on the application of a dual step energy detection algorithm. It has been designed and tailored to be effective in identifying DVB-T signals. A test campaign carried out in simulation environment has confirmed the goodness of the proposal.