Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (35)
- Article (unreviewed) (3)
- Part of a Book (2)
- Report (2)
Conference Type
- Konferenzartikel (35)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (42) (remove)
Keywords
- Eingebettetes System (4)
- Kommunikation (3)
- Automatisierungstechnik (1)
- Car-2-Car communication (1)
- Car-2-X communication (1)
- Design (1)
- Drahtloses lokales Netz (1)
- Energieverbrauch (1)
- Fahrzeug (1)
- Fernüberwachung (1)
Institute
Open Access
- Closed Access (22)
- Open Access (11)
- Bronze (4)
- Closed (4)
IPv6 over resource-constrained devices (6Lo) emerged as a de-facto standard for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications especially in home and building automation systems. We provide results of an investigation of the applicability of 6LoWPAN with RPL mesh networks for home and building automation use cases. The proper selection of Trickle parameters and neighbor reachable time-outs is important in the RPL protocol suite to respond efficiently to any path failure. These parameters were analyzed in the context of energy consumption w.r.t the number of control packets. The measurements were performed in an Automated Physical Testbeds (APTB). The results match the recommendation by RFC 7733 for selecting various parameters of RPL protocol suite. This paper shows the relationship between various RPL parameters and control traffic overhead during network rebuild. Comparative measurement results with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) in this work showed that 6Lo with RPL outperformed BLE in this use case with less control traffic overheads.
The monitoring of industrial environments ensures that highly automated processes run without interruption. However, even if the industrial machines themselves are monitored, the communication lines are currently not continuously monitored in todays installations. They are checked usually only during maintenance intervals or in case of error. In addition, the cables or connected machines usually have to be removed from the system for the duration of the test. To overcome these drawbacks, we have developed and implemented a cost-efficient and continuous signal monitoring of Ethernet-based industrial bus systems. Several methods have been developed to assess the quality of the cable. These methods can be classified to either passive or active. Active methods are not suitable if interruption of the communication is undesired. Passive methods, on the other hand, require oversampling, which calls for expensive hardware. In this paper, a novel passive method combined with undersampling targeting cost-efficient hardware is proposed.
6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks) is gaining more and more attraction for the seamless connectivity of embedded devices for the Internet of Things. It can be observed that most of the available solutions are following an open source approach, which significantly leads to a fast development of technologies and of markets. Although the currently available implementations are in a pretty good shape, all of them come with some significant drawbacks. It was therefore decided to start the development of an own implementation, which takes the advantages from the existing solutions, but tries to avoid the drawbacks. This paper discussed the reasoning behind this decision, describes the implementation and its characteristics, as well as the testing results. The given implementation is available as open-source project under [15].
A highly scalable IEEE802.11p communication and localization subsystem for autonomous urban driving
(2013)
The IEEE802.11p standard describes a protocol for car-to-X and mainly for car-to-car-communication. It has found its place in hardware and firmware implementations and is currently tested in various field tests. In the research project Ko-TAG, which is part of the research initiative Ko-FAS, cooperative sensor technology is developed for the support of highly autonomous driving. A secondary radar principle based on communication signals enables localization of objects with simultaneous data transmission. It mainly concentrates on the detection of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users (VRU), but also supports pre crash safety applications. Thus it is mainly targeted for the support of traffic safety applications in intra-urban scenarios. This contribution describes the Ko-TAG part of the overall initiative, which develops a subsystem to improve the real-time characteristics of IEEE802.11p needed for precise time of flight real-time localization. In doing this, it still fits into the regulatory schemes. It discusses the approach for definition and verification of the protocol design, while maintaining the close coexistence with existing IEEE802.11p subsystems. System simulations were performed and hardware was implemented. Test results are shown in the last part of the paper.
The IEEE802.11p standard describes a protocol for car-to-X and mainly for car-to-car-communication. It has found its place in hardware and firmware implementations and is currently tested in various field tests. In the research project Ko-TAG, which is part of the research initiative Ko-FAS, cooperative sensor technology is developed and its benefit for traffic safety applications is evaluated. A secondary radar principle based on communication signals enables localization of objects with simultaneous data transmission. It mainly concentrates on the detection of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users (VRU), but also supports pre crash safety applications. The Ko-TAG proposal enriches the current IEEE802.11p real-time characteristics needed for precise time-of-flight real-time localization. This contribution describes the development of a subsystem, which extends the functionality of IEEE802.11p and fits into the regulatory schemes. It discusses the approach for definition and verification of the protocol design, while maintaining the close coexistence with existing IEEE802.11p subsystems. System simulations were performed and hardware was implemented. The next step will be field measurements to verify the simulation results.
The M-Bus protocol (EN13757) is in widespread use for metering applications within home area and neighborhood area networks, but lacks a strict specification. This may lead to incompatibilities in real-life installations and to problems in the deployment of new M-Bus networks. This paper presents the development of a novel testbed to emulate physical Metering Bus (M-Bus) networks with different topologies and to allow the flexible verification of real M-Bus devices in real-world scenarios. The testbed is designed to support device manufacturers and service technicians in test and analysis of their devices within a specific network before their installation. The testbed is fully programmable, allowing flexible changes of network topologies, cable lengths and types. Itis easy to use, as only the master and the slaves devices have to be physically connected. This allows to autonomously perform multiple tests, including automated regression tests. The testbed is available to other researchers and developers. We invite companies and research institutions to use this M-Bus testbed to increase the common knowledge and real-world experience.
A novel approach of a testbed for embedded networking nodes has been conceptualized and implemented. It is based on the use of virtual nodes in a PC environment, where each node executes the original embedded code. Different nodes are running in parallel and are connected via so-called virtual interfaces. The presented approach is very efficient and allows a simple description of test cases without the need of a network simulator. Furthermore, it speeds up the process of developing new features.
The Metering Bus, also known as M-Bus, is a European standard EN13757-3 for reading out metering devices, like electricity, water, gas, or heat meters. Although real-life M-Bus networks can reach a significant size and complexity, only very simple protocol analyzers are available to observe and maintain such networks. In order to provide developers and installers with the ability to analyze the real bus signals easily, a web-based monitoring tool for the M-Bus has been designed and implemented. Combined with a physical bus interface it allows for measuring and recording the bus signals. For this at first a circuit has been developed, which transforms the voltage and current-modulated M-Bus signals to a voltage signal that can be read by a standard ADC and processed by an MCU. The bus signals and packets are displayed using a web server, which analyzes and classifies the frame fragments. As an additional feature an oscilloscope functionality is included in order to visualize the physical signal on the bus. This paper describes the development of the read-out circuit for the Wired M-Bus and the data recovery.
Wireless communication networks are crucial for enabling megatrends like the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0. However, testing these networks can be challenging due to the complex network topology and RF characteristics, requiring a multitude of scenarios to be tested. To address this challenge, the authors developed and extended an automated testbed called Automated Physical TestBed (APTB). This testbed provides the means to conduct controlled tests, analyze coexistence, emulate multiple propagation paths, and model dependable channel conditions. Additionally, the platform supports test automation to facilitate efficient and systematic experimentation. This paper describes the extended architecture, implementation, and performance evaluation of the APTB testbed. The APTB testbed provides a reliable and efficient solution for testing wireless communication networks under various scenarios. The implementation and performance verification of the testbed demonstrate its effectiveness and usefulness for researchers and industry practitioners.
Institute of Reliable Embedded Systems and Communication Electronics, Offenburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany has developed an automated testing environment, Automated Physical TestBeds (APTB), for analyzing the performance of wireless systems and its supporting protocols. Wireless physical networking nodes can connect to this APTB and the antenna output of this attaches with the RF waveguides. To model the RF environment this RF waveguides then establish wired connection among RF elements like splitters, attenuators and switches. In such kind of set up it’s well possible to vary the path characteristics by altering the attenuators and switches. The major advantage of using APTB is the possibility of isolated, well controlled, repeatable test environment in various conditions to run statistical analysis and even to execute regression tests. This paper provides an overview of the design and implementation of APTB, demonstrates its ability to automate test cases, and its efficiency.
Automated RF Emulator for a Highly Scalable IEEE802.11p Communication and Localization Subsystem
(2014)
The IEEE802.11p standard describes a protocol for car-to-X and mainly for car-to-car-communication. In the research project Ko-TAG, which is part of the research initiative Ko-FAS, cooperative sensor technology is developed for the support of highly autonomous driving. The Ko-TAG subsystem improves the real-time characteristics of IEEE802.11p needed for precise time of flight real-time localization while still fitting into the regulatory schemes. A secondary radar principle based on communication signals enables localization of objects with simultaneous data transmission. The Ko-TAG subsystem mainly concentrates on the support of traffic safety applications in intra-urban scenarios. This paper details on the development of a fully automated RF emulator used to test the Ko-TAG subsystem.
The RF emulator includes the physical networking nodes, but models the RF environment using RF-waveguides. The RF emulator allows the controlling of path loss and connectivity between any of the nodes with the help of RF attenuators and programmable RF switches, while it is shielded against its surrounding RF environment in the lab. Therefore it is an inexpensive alternative to an RF absorber chamber, which often is not available or exceeds the project’s budget.
Details about the system definition can be found in earlier papers. Test results are shown in the last part of the paper.
Automatisierte Tests für ein IEEE802.11p-kompatibles Kommunikations- und Lokalisierungssubsystem
(2014)
The research project Ko-TAG [2], as part of the research initiative Ko-FAS [1], funded by the German Ministry of Economics and Technologies (BMWi), deals with the development of a wireless cooperative sensor system that shall pro-vide a benefit to current driver assistance systems (DAS) and traffic safety applications (TSA). The system’s primary function is the localization of vulnerable road users (VRU) e.g. pedestrians and powered two-wheelers, using communication signals, but can also serve as pre-crash (surround) safety system among vehicles. The main difference of this project, compared to previous ones that dealt with this topic, e.g. the AMULETT project, is an underlying FPGA based Hardware-Software co-design. The platform drives a real-time capable communication protocol that enables highly scalable network topologies fulfilling the hard real-time requirements of the single localization processes. Additionally it allows the exchange of further data (e.g. sensor data) to support the accident pre-diction process and the channel arbitration, and thus supports true cooperative sensing. This paper gives an overview of the project’s current system design as well as of the implementations of the key HDL entities supporting the software parts of the communication protocol. Furthermore, an approach for the dynamic reconfiguration of the devices is described, which provides several topology setups using a single PCB design.
The communication between objects, i.e. between cars (car-2-car, C2C), between cars and infrastructure (car-2-infrastructure, C2I) and between cars and vulnerable road users (car-2-VRU, C2VRU) is a major stepping stone towards traffic applications to enable efficient and safe traffic flow. However, these applications pose very high requirements to the communication protocols, which go beyond the capabilities of an available standardized solution.
This contribution shows how iterative design processes can help to fulfill these requirements, while re-using a maximum of elements from one level to the next and thus avoiding unrealistic overhead. In especially, the added value of simulation and emulation in this iterative process is elaborated.
The Thread protocol is a recent development based on 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4), but with extensions regarding a more media independent approach, which – additionally – also promises true interoperability. To evaluate and analyse the operation of a Thread network a given open source 6LoWPAN stack for embedded devices (emb::6) has been extended in order to comply with the Thread specification. The implementation covers Mesh Link Establishment (MLE) and network layer functionality as well as 6LoWPAN mesh under routing mechanism based on MAC short addresses. The development has been verified on a virtualization platform and allows dynamical establishment of network topologies based on Thread's partitioning algorithm.
OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) is already a well-known concept used widely in the automation industry. In the area of factory automation, OPC UA models the underlying field devices such as sensors and actuators in an OPC UA server to allow connecting OPC UA clients to access device-specific information via a standardized information model. One of the requirements of the OPC UA server to represent field device data using its information model is to have advanced knowledge about the properties of the field devices in the form of device descriptions. The international standard IEC 61804 specifies EDDL (Electronic Device Description Language) as a generic language for describing the properties of field devices. In this paper, the authors describe a possibility to dynamically map and integrate field device descriptions based on EDDL into OPCUA.
Die neueste Generation von programmierbaren Logikbausteinen verfügt neben den konfigurierbaren Logikzellen über einen oder mehrere leistungsfähige Mikroprozessoren. In dieser Arbeit wird gezeigt, wie ein bestehendes Zwei-Chip-System auf einen Xilinx Zynq 7000 mit zwei ARM A9-Cores migriert wird. Bei dem System handelt es sich um das „GPS-gestützte Kreisel-system ADMA“ des Unternehmens GeneSys. Die neue Lösung verbessert den Datenaustausch zwischen dem ersten Mikroprozessor zur digitalen Signalverarbeitung und dem zweiten Prozessor zur Ablaufsteuerung durch ein Shared Memory. Für die schnelle und echtzeitfähige Datenübertragung werden zahlreiche hochbitratige Schnittstellengenutzt.
Wireless sensor networks have found their way into a wide range of applications, among which environmental monitoring systems have attracted increasing interests of researchers. Main challenges for these applications are scalability of the network size and energy efficiency of the spatially distributed nodes. Nodes are mostly battery-powered and spend most of their energy budget on the radio transceiver module. In normal operation modes most energy is spent waiting for incoming frames. A so-called Wake-On-Radio (WOR) technology helps to optimize trade-offs between energy consumption, communication range, complexity of the implementation and response time. We already proposed a new protocol called SmartMAC that makes use of such WOR technology. Furthermore, it gives the possibility to balance the energy consumption between sender and receiver nodes depending on the use case. Based on several calculations and simulations, it was predicted that the SmartMAC protocol was significantly more efficient than other schemes being proposed in recent publications, while preserving a certain backward compatibility with standard IEEE802.15.4 transceivers. To verify this prediction, we implemented the SmartMAC protocol for a given hardware platform. This paper compares the realtime performance of the SmartMAC protocol against simulation results, and proves the measured values are very close to the estimated values. Thus we believe that the proposed MAC algorithms outperforms all other Wake-on-Radio MACs.