Vehicular Connectivity

Traffic telematics applications are currently under intense research and development for making transportation safer, more efficient, and cleaner. Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) are central to an integrated approach in road safety so as to avoid potentially dangerous traffic situations and reduce number of accidents. Communication systems which provide “always on” connectivity at data rates between 1 and 10 Mb/s to highly mobile surface traffic (vehicles and trains) are urgently required for developing ITS. In this module, we focus on vehicle-to-infrastructure, infrastructure-to-vehicle, and vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems (“vehicle2X”).

Contact: Arrate Alonso, Georg Maier, Veronika Shivaldova

Smart Tags and Sensornets

The sustainable utilization of new fields of applications requires deep insights in the system and transmission techniques of wireless sensor networks (WSN) as well as identification technologies (RFID). A list of possible (future) application areas

Support of optimization in business processes by RFID
Monitoring and controlling to reduce energy consumption
Warning and preventive systems
Ambient Assisted Living for disabled or elderly persons
Wireless applications in telemetry (measuring systems, telebiometry,…)
Seamless Personal Connectivity
Industrial automation
Intra-Vehicle communications
„Internet of things“

The existing testbed for RFID systems mimics a reader capability at 13.56MHz. Its rapid prototyping environment is made very flexible in order to support quick turnaround times in algorithmic changes. In particular protocol changes running on a DSP can be directly converted from a C++ simulation environment, avoiding time consuming and error prone manual changes.

Such rapid prototyping environment allows for real-time experiments in particular at the physical layer concerning receiver and advanced detection algorithms. A major strength of our approach in the past years has been that we were able to convert our concepts into real-time experiments and measure their performance including the true physical environment rather than a more or less simplified model of it.

Current standards specify baseline requirements for the tags and the readers separately. True innovation in this field can only foster when both sides of the communications link are jointly optimized. Such joint optimization will be strongly supported by our experimental smart-tag testbed for sensor networks.

Contact: Robert Langwieser, Jelena Kaitovic

MIMO Networks

Today, wireless communication is omnipresent in the form of 2G and 3G cellular networks. Austria’s population (8 million inhabitants) is among the early adopters of wireless technology with a user base of almost 10 million (contracts)! Next to voice communications, many new applications are under development which challenge the capabilities of existing networks. This module will therefore start with the newest 3GPP standard for UMTS Long Term Evolution (LTE) and explore the evolution towards cooperative base stations and cross-layer approaches for network optimization.

The existing Vienna MIMO testbed will provide the baseline for the LTE testbed in WP3. We explore MIMO communications experimentally because the scientific community lacks consensus on what is to be viewed as a “typical’’ MIMO channel. In particular, the existing testbed will be extended to support co-ordinated transmissions from several base stations to several mobile terminals. The testbed will be operated in a burst mode which approximates realtime adaptivity of the MIMO transmission scheme, but requires significant offline postprocessing for evaluating performance metrics. The close-to-realtime burst mode is enabled by a mini-receiver which provides the channel quality feedback to the adaptive modulation and coding scheme with short delay. The mini-receiver, however, does not by itself allow to evaluate throughput-related performance metrics. Therefore all received data are buffered for extensive postprocessing.

Contact: Sebastian Caban, Josep Colom Ikuno, Michal Simko

Nearfield Power Efficiency

Today, RFID tags are commonplace in for contactless identification and manufacturing logistics. RFID tags are currently a growing industry and market in Austria. Many companies are actively involved in the development of RFID tags and systems. Nevertheless, many open questions remain in such field. How to design readers, which can reliably read multiple RFID, tags from large distance in the presence of strong interferers in a harsh environment. Another important question is to read out several hundred MByte or even Gbyte form contactless memory cards within a fraction of a second or how to maintain contactless smartcards with a wide variety of form factors. Another upcoming topic is to efficiently charge smart phones or even notebooks via the NFC interface.

Contact: Nikola Gvozdenovic, Manfred Westreicher