Ultra reliable Wireless Networks

Whether Industry 4.0, smart flow of goods or networked mobility: Digitization requires a lot of communication in networked systems, especially wirelessly networked, embedded, electronic systems - wherever mobility, flexibility or retrofitting in an existing environment are requirements.

At the application level, the requirements for the level of detail in digitization and for data quality continue to grow. Data-driven approaches such as learning systems or AI are also dependent on huge amounts of data. As a result, more and more data is generated that, in wireless systems, has to be transmitted over a shared radio resource.

Talk to our experts about the possibilities of improving your radio system through coding processes.

Network Coded Cooperation, as a network-based coding method, has the potential to reduce the need for communication in the wireless network and, at the same time  increase robustness. There is also the possibility that the individual radio node manages with a lower transmission power or that antenna diversity can be dispensed with, because this can be compensated for through the cooperation.

The advantages of network coding are:

• Increasing data throughput by combining data packets on the way to the receiver
• Increasing robustness against transmission errors by using redundant data and spatial diversity of different transmission paths
• Increasing efficiency and reduction of network traffic by flexibly combining data packets instead of serial transmission
• Increasing network flexibility and better routing by using spatial diversity of different transmission paths, cooperation and flexible combination of data packets

"Ambient IoT" and "Zero Energy Communications" are central topics of the current 3GPP and IEEE standardization on IoT devices powered by energy harvesting and using energy optimized wireless protocols. 

Our focus is on current opportunities, examples, and theoretical and practical limitations of realizing energy-autonomous wireless sensors that are sustainably powered from energy harvesting sources. We consider different application scenarios as well as different radio systems such as LPWAN, WLAN, Bluetooth and RFID in conjunction with current standardization activities in 3GPP and IEEE.

More Information about Ambient IoT and Energy Harvesting 

Use of Network Coded Cooperation

Network Coded Cooperation is already used at Fraunhofer IIS for some technologies:

IO-Link Wireless

Industrial wireless networking with deterministic cycle time 

IO-Link wireless radio technology, which can be used worldwide, provides a cost-effective, highly reliable and deterministic communication standard. For an application on a robot, wireless data communication for multi-axis inertial measurement units (IMU) was implemented, in which more powerful data protection methods based on network coding were also tested. We support them in deciding the right radio technology for their application as well as in implementing deterministic radio transmission based on IO-Link Wireless.

learn more about IO Link Wireless

Our research activities on network coding focus on high data throughput and high reliability especially for real-time wireless systems.

Technology consulting

Fraunhofer IIS has extensive technical and practical know-how to support you in the evaluation and introduction of radio systems as well as in the planned use of Network Coding or Network Coded Cooperation. In various projects, methods with low processing latency and low signaling overhead have already been designed, simulated and implemented as embedded real-time software.

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