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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.
TSN, or Time Sensitive Networking, is becoming an essential technology for integrated networks, enabling deterministic and best effort traffic to coexist on the same infrastructure. In order to properly configure, run and secure such TSN, monitoring functionality is a must. The TSN standard already has some preparations to provide such functionality and there are different methods to choose from. We implemented different methods to measure the time synchronisation accuracy between devices as a C library and compared the measurement results. Furthermore, the library has been integrated into the ControlTSN engineering framework.
Schlussbericht VanAssist
(2021)
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.
For the past few years Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) have emerged as key technologies for the connectivity of many applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) combining low-data rates with strict cost and energy restrictions. Especially LoRa/LoRaWAN enjoys a high visibility on today’s markets, because of its good performance and its open community. Originally LoRa was designed for operation within the Sub-GHz ISM bands for Industrial, Scientific and Medical applications. However, at the end of 2018, a LoRa-based solution in the 2.4GHz ISM-band was presented promising higher bandwidths and higher data rates. Furthermore, it overcomes the limited duty-cycle prescribed by the regulations in the ISM-bands and therefore also opens doors to many novel application fields. Also, due to higher bandwidths and shorter transmission times, the use of alternative MAC layer protocols becomes very interesting, i.e. for TDMA based-approaches. Within this paper, we propose a system architecture with 2.4GHz LoRa components combining two aspects. On the one hand, we present a design and an implementation of a 2.4GHz based LoRaWAN solution that can be seamlessly integrated into existing LoRaWAN back-hauls. On the other hand, we describe deterministic setup using a Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) approach as defined in the IEEE802.15.4-2015 standard for industrial applications. Finally, measurements show the performance of the system.
Das Monitoring von Industrieanlagen stellt in der Wirtschaft sicher, dass hoch-automatisierte Prozesse reibungslos ablaufen können. Meistens steht hier das Monitoring der Anlagen selbst im Mittelpunkt, die Kommunikationsleitungen für den Datenaustausch auf Ethernet-Basis (z.B. Profinet) sind gegenwärtig noch nicht Teil einer kontinuierlichen Überwachung. Zwar werden auch hier die physischen Verbindungen überprüft, jedoch geschieht häufig dies nur zum Zeitpunkt der Inbetriebnahme, wenn die Anlage noch nicht in das Gesamtsystem integriert ist oder während eines Wartungszyklus, wenn die Maschine für die Dauer der Wartung aus dem Betriebsablauf genommen wird. Dies führt dazu, dass insbesondere heute, wo vor allem Ethernet zunehmend als Basis für die industrielle Kommunikation herangezogen wird, Maschinenausfälle aufgrund fehlender Kabelüberwachung immer wahrscheinlicher werden. Um dem entgegenwirken zu können, wurde im Projekt Ko2SiBus ein neues Messverfahren konzipiert, implementiert und validiert, das kostengünstig in neue oder bestehende Systeme integriert werden kann. Um die Tauglichkeit zu zeigen, wurden die Projektergebnisse in Prototypen und Demonstratoren implementiert, die sowohl als Stand-Alone aber auch als Integrationslösungen dienen können.
Eine kontinuierliche Überwachung von Ethernet-Leitungne beugt Maschinenausfällen in der Industrie vor. Aktuell fehlen jedoch geiegnete Methoden, um diese Überwachung flächendeckend durchzuführen. Im Projekt Ko²SiBus wurde deshalb ein kostengünstiges Verfahren zur kontinuierlichen Überwachung von Ethernet-Leitungen entwickelt.
The number of use cases for autonomous vehicles is increasing day by day especially in commercial applications. One important application of autonomous vehicles can be found within the parcel delivery section. Here, autonomous cars can massively help to reduce delivery efforts and time by supporting the courier actively. One important component of course is the autonomous vehicle itself. Nevertheless, beside the autonomous vehicle, a flexible and secure communication architecture also is a crucial key component impacting the overall performance of such system since it is required to allow continuous interactions between the vehicle and the other components of the system. The communication system must provide a reliable and secure architecture that is still flexible enough to remain practical and to address several use cases. In this paper, a robust communication architecture for such autonomous fleet-based systems is proposed. The architecture provides a reliable communication between different system entities while keeping those communications secure. The architecture uses different technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), cellular networks and Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) to achieve its goals.
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.
With the surge in global data consumption with proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT), remote monitoring and control is increasingly becoming popular with a wide range of applications from emergency response in remote regions to monitoring of environmental parameters. Mesh networks are being employed to alleviate a number of issues associated with single-hop communication such as low area coverage, reliability, range and high energy consumption. Low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks (LoWPANs) are being used to help realize and permeate the applicability of IoT. In this paper, we present the design and test of IEEE 802.15.4-compliant smart IoT nodes with multi-hop routing. We first discuss the features of the software stack and design choices in hardware that resulted in high RF output power and then present field test results of different baseline network topologies in both rural and urban settings to demonstrate the deployability and scalability of our solution.
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.
Wireless sensor networks have recently found their way into a wide range of applications among which environmental monitoring system has attracted increasing interests of researchers. Such monitoring applications, in general, don way into a wide range of applications among which environmental monitoring system has attracted increasing interests of researc latency requirements regarding to the energy efficiency. Also a challenge of this application is the network topology as the application should be able to be deployed in very large scale. Nevertheless low power consumption of the devices making up the network must be on focus in order to maximize the lifetime of the whole system. These devices are usually battery-powered and spend most of their energy budget on radio transceiver module. A so-called Wake-On-Radio (WoR) technology can be used to achieve a reasonable balance among power consumption, range, complexity and response time. In this paper, some designs for integration of WOR into IEEE 802.1.5.4 are to be discussed, providing an overview of trade-offs in energy consumption while deploying the WoR schemes in a monitoring system.
Environmental Monitoring is an attractive application field for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Water Level Monitoring helps to increase the efficiency of water distribution and management. In Pakistan, the world’s largest irrigation system covers 90.000 km of channels which needs to be monitored and managed on different levels. Especially the sensor systems for the small distribution channels need to be low energy and low cost. The distribution presents a technical solution for a communication system which is developed in a research project being co-funded by German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The communication module is based on IEEE-802.15.4 transceivers which are enhanced through Wake-On-Radio (WOR) to combine low-energy and real-time behavior. On higher layers, IPv6 (6LoWPAN) and corresponding routing protocols like Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) can extend range of the network. The data are stored in a database and can be viewed online via a web interface. Of course, also automatic data analysis can be performed.
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].
Wireless sensor networks have found their way into a wide range of applications among which environmental monitoring systems have attracted increasing interests of researchers. The main challenges for the applications are scalability of the network size and energy efficiency of the spatially distributed motes. These devices are mostly battery-powered and spend most of their energy budget on the radio transceiver module. A so-called Wake-On-Radio (WOR) technology can be used to achieve a reasonable balance among power consumption, range, complexity and response time. In this paper, a novel design for integration of WOR into IEEE802.1.5.4 is presented, which flexibly allows trade-offs in energy consumption between sender and receiver station, between real-time capability and energy consumption. For identical behavior, the proposed scheme is significantly more efficient than other schemes, which were proposed in recent publications, while preserving backward compatibility with standard IEEE802.15.4 transceivers.
Die Vielfalt der Protokolle, die praktisch auf allen Ebenen der Netzwerkkommunikation zu berücksichtigen ist, stellt eine der großen Herausforderungen bei der fortschreitenden Automatisierung des intelligenten Hauses dar. Unter dem Überbegriff Internet der Dinge (Internet of Things) entstehen gegenwärtig zahlreiche neue Entwicklungen, Standards, Allianzen und so genannte Ökosysteme. Diese haben die Absicht einer horizontalen Integration gewerkeübergreifender Anwendungen und verfolgen fast alle das Ziel, die Situation zu vereinfachen, die Entwicklungen zu beschleunigen und Markterfolge zu erreichen. Leider macht diese Vielfalt momentan die Welt aber eher noch komplexer und bringt damit das Risiko mit sich, genau das Gegenteil der ursprünglichen Absichten zu erreichen. Dieser Beitrag versucht, die Entwicklungen möglichst systematisch zu kategorisieren und mögliche Lösungsansätze zu beschreiben.
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.