Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS
Visit us at booth 7G31 in hall 7 at the MWC 2019 in Barcelona. We look forward to seeing you!
Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2019
Audio and Media Technologies
EVS: Crystal clear and robust phone calls
Enhanced Voice Services (EVS), the state-of-the-art 3GPP/GSMA speech and audio codec, has been adopted as mandatory for Vo5G services and is already in use in VoLTE/VoWiFi services worldwide. It enables phone calls with super-wideband high-quality speech, bringing call fidelity up to the same level as today’s other digital media services – at unmatched low bit rates. Thanks to EVS’s advanced robustness against packet loss, network coverage is considerably enhanced, including indoor coverage. Stop by our phone booths and experience an EVS call: it will feel like you’re in the same room with the person you’re talking to.
upHear Voice Quality Enhancement: Enhanced far-field voice signals for smart devices
Yandex.Station
You will also be able to check out Fraunhofer upHear Voice Quality Enhancement. This software facilitates voice-controlled human-machine interaction even at great distance to the smart device. The technology is flexible towards a wide range of microphone array geometries built into mobile phones and smart home devices such as smart speakers. upHear Voice Quality Enhancement removes interfering sounds captured by the device’s microphones, extracts the user’s voice and cancels out acoustical echoes – making it easier for the automatic speech recognizer to understand a request. Russian-based technology company Yandex has incorporated upHear Voice Quality Enhancement into its first smart speaker, enabling the device’s keyword spotter and speech recognizer to accurately hear voice commands issued from anywhere in a room, even when the speaker is playing music at the same time.
MPEG-H Audio: Personalized and immersive audio
At MWC Barcelona, you are also invited to personalize an audio mix of OTT streaming content with MPEG-H Audio. For example, you can switch between different languages, adjust the volume of a sports commentator, enhance the dialogue, or choose from various audio description options. Personalization features like the latter enable providers of video streaming services to offer more advanced accessibility services. MPEG-H Audio is the first next-generation audio system used in a regular terrestrial 4K TV service and standardized in 3GPP, DVB and ATSC 3.0. It delivers immersive and interactive sound, also on mobile devices, enabling the best audio experience for example in 360°-video applications over 5G. In terms of content delivery and playback, MPEG-H’s universal delivery concept ensures the best sound, regardless of the consumer device or listening environment.
xHE-AAC: The latest audio codec for music and video streaming
Poor network connectivity causing audio streams to drop is a thing of the past, thanks to xHE-AAC. The latest addition to the AAC codec family offers maximum coding efficiency, with a bit rate range from 12 kbit/s to 500 kbit/s and above for stereo services. Combining this with seamless bit rate switching over DASH and HLS, and mandatory MPEG-D DRC Loudness and Dynamic Range Control, xHE-AAC is the ideal solution for adaptive audio and video streaming services – whether it’s for movies, music, audiobooks or podcasts – as well as for digital radio broadcasting. The codec is natively supported in Android 9 Pie. Come put it to the test at Fraunhofer’s MWC booth, where we will showcase various video and Internet radio streaming applications with xHE-AAC.
5G Technologies
Pushing the Limits of 5G Positioning
Perspective positioning performance for NR and other technologies in different enviroments
5G NR delivers a groundbreaking improvement in positioning performance by providing high bandwidths for precise timing, new mm-wave frequency bands, massive MIMO for accurate angle of arrival estimation, and new architectural options to support positioning. This will be of benefit in the increasing number of positioning use cases in smart cities and smart buildings. Ranging from navigation in car parks and shopping malls to tracking of the growing number of mobile sensors and cognitive IoT devices, these use cases will change our day-to-day lives. But above all, 5G positioning will bring huge benefits in the form of accelerated industrial and logistics processes by enabling the localization of AGVs and drones in industrial facilities, the tracking of components in intralogistics scenarios, and the use of 5G positioning in AR/VR applications.
Fraunhofer IIS’s Test and Application Center L.I.N.K. in Nuremberg offers testing of 5G positioning as part of industrial processes. The center provides the space to apply 5G in industrial and logistics processes under real-life conditions, to elaborate specific use cases and to learn more about the possibilities and limits of 5G. Do you need a customized positioning solution, or would you simply like to know how 5G positioning works? Feel free to get in touch with us and we will address your issue, drawing on more than 20 years of positioning expertise.
5G communication - SUDAS: Improved indoor coverage and vehicular connectivity
5G is expected to enable much higher data rates of up to 10 Gbit/s. With this in mind, Fraunhofer IIS has developed SUDAS (Shared UE-side distributed antenna system) to achieve better indoor coverage. SUDAS is an infrastructure comprising many easily installable relay nodes (SUDACs), which can be positioned within buildings or vehicles. SUDACs receive signals from mobile communications base stations and forward them at a millimeter-band frequency to mobile devices within a building or vehicle. Because each device receives signals from multiple SUDACs, these function as the devices’ distributed antennas and thus form a virtual MIMO network.
The combination of massive MIMO and mm-wave technology is ideal for achieving high data rates and establishing reliable outdoor-indoor connectivity. SUDAS thus paves the way for improved mobile communications reception at home and at public hotspots. What’s more, SUDAS can be used for connectivity and infotainment solutions in vehicles and public transportation, as well as for reliable wireless connections in industrial buildings.
SUDAS is one of the solutions that Fraunhofer IIS has developed for 5G enhanced mobile broadband reception. The functionality of SUDAS will premiere live at MWC Barcelona 2019.