Events Calendar

Towards Fully Flexible Energy Autonomous Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Speaker: Hans-Peter Bernhard, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria Institute for Communications Engineering and RF-Systems

Talk Title: Towards Fully Flexible Energy Autonomous Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: Wireless communication links in industrial environments are gradually replacing wired solutions. This transition offers more flexibility and enables new technologies and applications to arise. However for industrial monitoring tasks, currently available wireless standards do not meet all requirements, and depending on the application, different standards have to be used. In this overview, results from the European research project Dependable Embedded Wireless Infrastructure (DEWI) are presented, which led to the development of a new highly flexible wireless protocol. The degree of flexibility of the protocol not only allows to meet various requirements in industrial monitoring, but also to cover communication needs of the entire operation cycle of sensor nodes. Additionally, to enable a maximum degree of freedom, it is designed to operate energy autonomously with a strictly limited power budget imposed by energy harvesting. Aside of all theses requirements, synchronized sampling is a very important topic in industrial measurement environments using hundreds of sensors. We show the use of a \alpha\epsilon-modulator to synchronize the nodes within a wireless sensor network. This is a new method to achieve long term synchronization, also during long offline periods, with least possible short term sampling jitter. Closely related to synchronization is clock frequency estimation. Without a highly accurate estimated clock, network synchronization won't work. But, in wireless systems or harsh environments, it is likely that clock events can be missed and, therefore, the observed process has to be treated as a sparse periodic process. To parameterize the clock, current research is applying periodogram estimators at a complexity of at least O(N log N). Here a highly accurate iterative frequency estimator for pulse signals with low computational complexity is shown. It is an unbiased estimator with a complexity of O(N). Furthermore, the mean square error (MSE) of this new efficient approach is proportional to O(N_3) and thus as accurate as periodogram or frequency domain based methods. The talk concludes with a short review and an outline of ongoing and future research in highly flexible wireless sensor networks.


Biography: He received the Dipl.-Ing. (M.Sc.) degree in communication engineering and the Dr. techn. (Ph.D.) degree with distinction from Vienna Technical University in 1991 and 1997, respectively.

From 1985 to 1992 he worked for different companies in the area of database and organizational programming. From 1992 to 1998 he was with the Institute for Communications and Radio Frequency Engineering at the Technical University Vienna as a research assistant and became in 1994 assistant professor at this institute. From 1997 on he started teaching at HTBLA-Steyr. In 1999 he joined the Institute for Communications Engineering and RF-Systems, Johannes Kepler University Linz, as a lecturer and he currently holds a senior researcher position at this institute. He was guest researcher with the Institute for Information Theory and Automation, Academy of Sciences Prague and with the University of Cambridge UK, Engineering Department, Inst. f. Vision Speech and Robotics. Starting in 2004 he served as consultant for several companies as there are Infineon, DICE (Danube Integrated Circuit Engineering GmbH & Co KG), and others. In 2007 he founded a scientific consulting company with focus on assisting handicapped persons and nonprofit health care organizations. He is holding patents in the field of computer science and computer assisting systems for handicapped persons. He has contributed to the following research projects "Nonlinear Methods in Speech processing", "Assisting Handicapped Persons in Computer Handling" and he supervised the research project "Information Theoretic Methods for Load Curve Prediction" in collaboration with SIEMENS power grid department. From 2014 to 2017 he worked also with the European ARTEMIS project DEWI (Dependable Embedded Wireless Infrastructure) focussed on energy efficient sensing, signal processing and communication. Currently he is involved in the joint undertaking of Electronic Components and Systems for European Leadership (ECSEL) on Secure Connected Trustable Things (SCOTT) as a senior scientist. His research interests include algorithm design for wireless communications with a special focus on synchronization, security and energy efficient protocols.

Hans-Peter Bernhard received the GIT-Award in 1991, in the year 2000 he was awarded with the innovation award of Upper Austrian government and he was Austrian representative at the Novartis International Science Week Switzerland with the best Austrian education project in health care. Hans-Peter Bernhard is an IEEE senior member and member of the signal processing society.


Host: Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu, EEB 536, x04667

Location: 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos