H.-P. Bernhard

Silicon Austria Labs GmbH /Johannes Kepler University Linz · Research Unit Wireless Communication / Institut for Communication and RF Systems

Unique Word-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (UW-OFDM) is known to provide various performance benefits over conventional cyclic prefix (CP) based OFDM. Most important, UW-OFDM features excellent spectral sidelobe suppression properties and an outstanding bit error ratio (BER) performance. Carrier frequency offset (CFO) induced impairment...

5G is considered a promising wireless communication technology to fulfill the high-demanding communication requirements of many Industry 4.0 applications. This work evaluates a 5G campus network for indoor factory floor scenarios using the latest commercially available 3GPP release-16 developments. The measurement campaign is conducted to obtain de...

Over the last decade, society and industries are undergoing rapid digitization that is expected to lead to the evolution of the cyber-physical continuum. End-to-end deterministic communications infrastructure is the essential glue that will bridge the digital and physical worlds of the continuum. We describe the state of the art and open challenges...

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is one of the key enablers for low-power and low-cost applications in consumer electronics and the Internet of Things. The latest features such as audio and direction finding will introduce more and more devices that rely on BLE for communication. However, like many other wireless standards, BLE relies on the unlicensed 2...

Nowadays Internet-of-Things and Industry 4.0 devices are often connected wirelessly. Current wireless sensor network (WSN) deployments are relying in most cases on the industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) bands without centralized resource scheduling. Thus, each device is a potential source of interference to other devices, both within its own...

The digital transformation of Industry 4.0 is driven by the automation of manufacturing processes. In this context, communication plays a vital role and the emergence of 5G wireless technology brings the promise of connectivity scenarios like the industrial internet of things and industrial cyber-physical systems. However, there are still several a...

Over the last decade, society and industries are undergoing rapid digitization that is expected to lead to the evolution of the cyber-physical continuum. End-to-end deterministic communications infrastructure is the essential glue that will bridge the digital and physical worlds of the continuum. We describe the state of the art and open challenges...

Advanced industrial communication systems are fundamental pillars of the ongoing digital transformation of industrial systems. Initiatives like the Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet Consortium aim at increasing the overall production efficiency leveraging on fast, reliable, and deterministic communication technologies. The improvements of in...

Vehicular communications face unique security issues in wireless communications. While new vehicles are equipped with a large set of communication technologies, product life cycles are long and software updates are not widespread. The result is a host of outdated and unpatched technologies being used on the street. This has especially severe securi...

This paper describes the measurement setup for the proliferation of the vehicular communication systems in operating cars. The setup builds on a communication sniffer which detects cooperative awareness messages broadcast from ETSI ITS-G5 systems, decodes them and records the public information in these messages. The experimental characterization o...

Many emerging applications require a higher level of flexibility, modularity, and efficiency but are dependent on advancements in communication infrastructure and distributed computing. Time-sensitive networking (TSN) standards aim at providing vendor agnostic, reliable, and deterministic communications over the Ethernet, but lack in flexibility an...

Functional safety has become a crucial part of industrial automation. With industry environments being connected more than ever, achieving required functional safety depends on establishing safety-critical communication. Numerous application layer safety protocols have been developed to ensure compliance with functional safety standards for wired c...

Industrial wireless sensor networks are becoming crucial for modern manufacturing. If the sensors in those networks are mobile, the position information, besides the sensor data itself, can be of high relevance. E.g. this position information can increase the trustability of a wireless sensor measurement by assuring that the sensor is not physicall...

For Cyper-Physical Production Systems (CPPS), localization is becoming increasingly important as wireless and mobile devices are considered an integral part. While localizing targets in a wireless communication system based on the Received Signal Strength Indicators (RSSIs) is a usual solution, it is limited by sensor quality. We consider the scena...

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications require reliable and efficient wireless communication. Assuming dense Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) operating in a harsh environment, a concept of a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based WSN enriched with Electronically Steerable Parasitic Array Radiator (ESPAR) antennas is proposed and exami...

Minimized and nearly deterministic end-to-end latency facilitates real-time data acquisition and actuator control. In addition, defined latency is an integral part of quality oriented service in order to get closer to the reliability of wired networks and at the same time take advantage of wireless networking. This paper introduces a QoS routing pr...

Unique word-orthogonal frequency division mul-tiplexing (UW-OFDM) is known to provide various performance benefits over conventional OFDM using cyclic prefixes (CP). Most important, UW-OFDM features excellent spectral sidelobe suppression properties and an outstanding bit error ratio performance. Current research has mainly focused on principle per...

A continually growing number of sensors is required for monitoring industrial processes and for continuous data acquisition from industrial plants and devices. The cabling of sensors represent a considerable effort and potential source of error, which can be avoided by using wireless sensor nodes. These wireless sensor nodes form a wireless sensor...

We propose to add a monitoring system consisting of so-called path- and guard nodes to industrial wireless sensor network (IWSN), to increase the security level by using RSSI measurements. Via these measurements, the monitoring system determines the presence of a mobile sensor node in a predefined area, which can be used to handle access rights and...

Unique word-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (UW-OFDM) is known to provide various performance benefits over conventional OFDM using cyclic prefixes (CP). Most important, UW-OFDM features excellent spectral sidelobe suppression properties and an outstanding bit error ratio performance. Current research has mainly focused on principle perf...

The Time-Sensitive networks paradigm envisions the integration of Operation Technology and Information Technology in the same network. One of the requirements for building Time-Sensitive networks is sharing a global time along the network. This requirement is especially critical in wireless systems, where there are few robust methods to perform acc...

Smart transducers based on ISO/IEC/IEEE 21450 provide standardized access to sensors and actuators. Hence, no centralized database is needed for the calibration and interpretation of the data collected by transducers. The smart transducer stores and maintains its individual transducer electronic data sheet (TEDS). Whenever transducers are replaced...

Zusammenfassung Zur Überwachung von industriellen Prozessen und zur laufenden Messdatenerfassungen von Indust-rieanlagen und-Geräten werden immer mehr und mehr Sensoren benötigt. Diese Entwicklung wird vor allem durch industrielle Internet-of-Things (IoT) Anwendungen gleichzeitig ermöglicht und voran-getrieben. Die Verkabelung stellt einen erheblic...

We present the design of a suite of protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with respect to a complete life cycle of a WSN node from warehouse to the end of operation. While there are numerous publications on various, usually isolated, aspects of WSNs, the whole life cycle of a node from registration in an automation system via warehouse, cal...

In many applications the pulse duration of a periodic pulse signal is the parameter of interest. Thereby, the non-band-limited pulse signal is sampled during a finite observation period yielding to aliasing and windowing effects, respectively. In this work, the pulse duration estimation based on the mean value of the samples is considered, and a cl...

We analyse the use of a ΔΣ-modulator in the nodes of a wireless sensor network, which is a new method to achieve long term synchronization. We consider star topology WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) with a central base station and address timing synchronization using low frequency realtime clocks. The WSN uses a beacon driven TDMA-protocol for bidir...

Nonlinear signal processing is now well established both in theory and applications. Nevertheless, very few tools are available for the analysis of nonlinear systems. We introduce the mutual information function (MIF) as a nonlinear correlation function and describe the practicalities of estimating it from data. Even if an estimator is consistent,...

One of the striking questions in prediction theory is this: is there a chance to predict future values of a given signal? Usually, we design a predictor for a special signal or problem and then measure the resulting prediction quality. If there is no a priori knowledge on the optimal predictor, the achieved prediction gain will depend strongly of t...

Die Vorhersage zukünftiger Signalwerte spielt in vielen technischen Anwendungen eine bedeutende Rolle. Mit Hilfe der Informationstheorie läßt sich der maximale Vorhersagegewinn, basierend auf einer reinen Signalanalyse, bestimmen. Dieses Ergebnis wird verwendet, um Prognosemethoden zu bewerten und um zu entscheiden, ob es aufgrund der Signaleigensc...

This paper presents an in-depth study of nonlinear long-term prediction of speech signals. While previous studies of nonlinear prediction focused on short-term prediction (with only moderate performance advantage over adaptive linear prediction in most cases), successful long-term prediction strongly depends on the nonlinear oscillator framework fo...

In case of signal or time series prediction, it is important to know if there is any chance for prediction or not. Therefore, the maximum achievable prediction gain is the desired measure used to characterize the future knowledge of a signal. We present a method to evaluate the maximum prediction gain based on the observed signal only. Hence, the p...

In modern signal analysis, chaos-theoretic interpretation is becoming more and more popular. One of the most important parameters of chaotic systems is their information gain or entropy rate. Its measurement provides performance limits for nonlinear signal models in source coding and prediction applications. We have developed a fast algorithm for t...