Communication Systems

Current communication systems inside vehicle demand highly increased data rates to improve the performance of several applications including driver assistance, safety and comfort. In the context of automated driving functions, the redundant communication system must have a high data rate in order to be able to transport enough information from the vehicle sensors to the evaluation and decision units even if the system malfunctions.

Cognition is a term referring to the mental processes involved in gaining knowledge and comprehension, including thinking, knowing, remembering, judging and problem-solving. Resulting from this definition, the CR is a self-aware intelligent communication system that autonomously coordinates the usage of spectrum by identifying unused radio spectrum on the basis of observation of spectrum usage and utilizes it in efficient manner. CR may have a significant impacts on both technology and regulation of spectrum usage leading to a revolution in wireless communication.

Filter Bank Multi Carrier (FBMC) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) are the forms of multicarrier modulation schemes. OFDM has been successfully used for wired and wireless modern communication from DAB, DVB-T to LTE and 4G. However, in some applications, e.g. cognitive radio or energy efficient spectrum utilization, OFDM may not be an appropriate solution. Therefore, recently FBMC is considered as one of the strongest potential candidate for 5G to deal with the difficulties of OFDM, which got a lot of attention of researches.

The research goal is the realisation of a broadband data transmission over the already installed on board power supply in a motor vehicle. Through the omission of additional wiring harnesses, a significant weight- and cost reduction can be obtained in the car manufacturing process. As opposed to home power line communication (PLC) different demands and environmental conditions have to be dealt with in an automotive environment.

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is a modern approach of transferring telecommunications engineering hardware into software. The basis for that is a minimalistic hardware setup consisting of an antenna, HF-device and high performance A/D and D/A converters. The main goal is to keep the hardware as simple as possible: the whole base band signal processing shall be done in software. Systems like these are not restricted to be only transmitters and can be used as receivers in highly mobile applications as well.

The chair Digital and Circuit Technology is carrying out intensive research in the field of wireless communications. We are especially analysing wireless standards like LTE, DAB+, IEEE 802.11 and LoRa as well as Next Generation Networks and IoT. In these particular fields, our primary focus is research on different Physical- and Mac-Layer algorithms.