Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication
Brno University of Technology
Technicka 12, 616 00 Brno, Czech Republic
Research plan of the SIX Center
for years 2014 to 2018
Prof. Zbynek Raida
Director of the SIX Center
Prof. M. Kasal, Prof. S. Hanus, Prof. K. Vrba, Prof. Z. Smekal, Prof. Radimir Vrba
Heads of SIX departments
Brno, November 2013
Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Research objectives 2
2.1 Investigating electromagnetic structures for emerging frequency bands 2
2.2 Investigating intelligent and software defined communication systems 5
2.3 Investigating convergence of communication and information systems 11
2.4 Investigating digital methods for processing speech, audio and video signals 16
2.5 Investigating sensing technologies and the procedures of integrating them into sensor networks 20
3. Time frame 25
3.1 Investigating electromagnetic structures for emerging frequency bands 25
3.2 Investigating intelligent and software defined communication systems 27
3.3 Investigating convergence of communication and information systems 30
3.4 Investigating digital methods for processing speech, audio and video signals 32
3.5 Investigating sensing technologies and the procedures of integrating them into sensor networks 34
4. Expected results 38
4.1 Investigating electromagnetic structures for emerging frequency bands 38
4.2 Investigating intelligent and software defined communication systems 39
4.3 Investigating convergence of communication and information systems 39
4.4 Investigating digital methods for processing speech, audio and video signals 40
4.5 Investigating sensing technologies and the procedures of integrating them into sensor networks 41
SIX: Research plan 2014 to 2018
1. Introduction
The SIX Research Center was established to support innovation in companies which actively exploit communication, information and sensor technologies in different areas of life. Supporting the quality of life of the aging population (sensing life functions and wireless transmission of information), reducing the danger of terroristic attacks (sensing marks of dangerous substances and wireless warning), controlling traffic using the concept of an intelligent highway (mutual communication among cars and stationary units) or timely diagnosis of nervous diseases using the analysis of speech signals can be given as examples.
The SIX Research Center exploits the background of the university to obtain new knowledge and to create novel solutions by its own fundamental research. New knowledge is subsequently applied to novel products and novel services of partner companies.
The success of the center is conditioned by strong fundamental research (knowledge to be applied is created), by interdisciplinary coverage of several research areas (basis to create complex solutions is built) and by international cooperation in research (international standards of research are respected).
The presented research plane discusses research directions in the fundamental research which can bring promising outputs to be applied in communication, information and sensor systems in a near future. Hence, the research plan is aimed…
… to obtain new fundamental knowledge, which is applicable in emerging communication systems.
The dominant objective can be divided to five partial objectives:
1. To research emerging electromagnetic structures operating in frequency bands from 10GHz to 110 GHz; but be aware of potential effects of these solutions to living organisms.
2. To research principles of intelligent and software defined communication systems; but think about the applicability of these principles in communication systems.
3. To research the convergence of communication and information technologies for creating novel concepts of communication and information systems; but think about ways of systemic security and exploitation of low-power high-speed electronic circuits in these systems.
4. To research digital systems for extracting information from speech and image signals; and exploit advanced digital signal processing techniques for the consequent diagnostics of malfunctions of investigated objects.
5. To complete outputs of other programs by the research of sensing of physical quantities and integrate all the components to a sensor network; and think about implementation of such a complex solution in the form of integrated electronics.
The research plan is conceived as a research perspective of the SIX Center in future five years. Objectives of the research plan are therefore formulated wider to create a space for topical research trends to appear in partial specializations of the SIX Center.
2. Research Objectives
In this paragraph, we describe partial objectives of the fundamental research to be performed by research departments of the SIX Center in years 2014 to 2018.
2.1. Investigating electromagnetic structures for emerging frequency bands
State of the art. At present, recognized research laboratories are focusing their fundamental research in the area of electromagnetics to the investigation of the following problems:
a) Non-harmonic electromagnetic fields. From the theoretical point of view, harmonic electromagnetic fields represent an unacceptable simplification of the physical reality (in order to create the harmonic field, an infinitely long signal with an infinite energy has to be considered). For this reason, attention is turned to the development of methods, which are able to analyze electromagnetic fields of an arbitrary time response (so-called methods of time-domain analysis).
The finite-difference time-domain method (FDTD) is the most popular approach to the numerical analysis of non-harmonic fields. Nevertheless, interests of the electromagnetic community are oriented to other directions:
- Time domain finite elements (TDFE) are the numerical method devoted to the solution of Maxwell equations in the differential form. Whereas FDTD exploits piecewise constant basis functions, Dirac weighting functions and regular discretization meshes, TDFE allows us to select arbitrary basis functions and weighting ones and let us to generate more or less arbitrary discretization meshes. A higher complexity of the method is the price we have to pay for ahigher flexibility of the method [1.1].
- Time domain integral equations (TDIE) are a very attractive approach to the analysis of the radiation of electromagnetic waves of an arbitrary time response to the surrounding space. Due to enormous complexity, TDIE is a subject of intensive research at present.
SIX is going to concentrate on the research of finite elements and integral equations.
b) Multi-objective synthesis of electromagnetic structures. Electromagnetic structures can be described by a numerical model in the integral or differential form. When varying properly selected parameters of the numerical model, we can change observed properties of this model. Observed properties can be of technical sense (impedance matching, gain), the economic sense (production costs) and other (shape, dimensions). The differences between the current properties of the model and the required ones are described by partial objective functions.
Improvement of properties of the model with respect to one objective can cause the degradation of properties with respect to other objectives. For this reason, we have to compute the set of all the solutions, which exhibit the optimality with respect to one objective at least [1.2]. This is a highly complicated computational problem which can be solved thanks to the increasing power of computers in recent years.
In order to make multi-objective synthesis successful, attention has to be turned to the proper formulation of partial objectives and to their proper combination. Moreover, the numerical model has to be properly formulated and parameterized, and finally, all the related computational routines have to be implemented in a form of sophisticated routines exploiting techniques of the parallel and distributed computations.
All these questions are going to be answered by the SIX research.
c) Electromagnetic structures for non-conventional applications. The design of antennas and microwave circuits for conventional applications is based on quite complicated but known principles; this task is therefore covered by the applied research. When designing electromagnetic structures for a non-conventional application, novel related phenomena have to be investigated and non-conventional approaches have to be used. Here are some examples:
- Structures for biomedical research. The human body is a lossy, dispersive object. If antennas are operating in vicinity of such an object, the near field of an antenna can be significantly deformed, and properties of an antenna can be significantly influenced [1.3]. For this reason, an interaction between the near field of the antenna and a human body has to be investigated, and the influence of the human body to the near field of the antenna has to be considered.
- Structures in non-stationary environment. Existing methods of the design of electromagnetic structures are based on deterministic descriptions by equations in an integral form or a differential form. These descriptions are not able to reflect the probabilistic spirit of phenomena related to the operation of these structures (the changing number of persons in a room, e.g.). In our research, we would like to describe parameters of investigated structures, which have been considered to be deterministic by now, by probabilistic densities. Results of the analysis should tell us, what is the probability, that a given structure reaches a given value of the parameter.
- Structures operating at high frequencies. New systems for communication, detection of objects and other applications are tending to be shifted to frequency bands of millimeter waves and terahertz frequencies. Operation of structures in these bands is associated with quite new phenomena which have not been observed at lower frequencies. Investigations of these phenomena (new parasitic properties, new properties of materials and surroundings) have been intensively performed at present. Such a research is necessary for further development of communication and other technologies.
Due to the described reasons, we will turn our attention to the research of electromagnetic structures for non-conventional applications.
Outputs of existing research. Partial areas of the research have been already developed by the research team of microwave technologies and are going to be further developed.
a) Non-harmonic electromagnetic fields. Methods of the numerical analysis of non-harmonic electromagnetic fields have been dominantly investigated in frame of the European project High Intensity Radiated Field – Synthetic Environment (HIRF-SE) [1.5]. In this project, methods of modeling non-harmonic fields inside small airplanes manufactured from composite materials have been researched. Our team was responsible for the development of modules based on TDFE, TDIE and artificial neural networks.
b) Multi-objective synthesis of electromagnetic structures. The existing research has been dominantly associated with the project of the international research cooperation COST IC1102 [1.6]. Our attention has been turned to the research of multi-objective optimization techniques operating in different domains (frequency domain, time domain) and combining different optimization approaches (evolutionary techniques, swarm-intelligence techniques). Our team has developed an original multi-objective approach based on a self-organizing migration.
c) Electromagnetic structures for non-conventional applications. The existing research is strongly influenced by research contracts solved by the team of microwave technologies. Solution of research contracts usually reveals problems which become an inspiration for the fundamental research.
A research contract for Volkswagen can be given as an example. The contract was focused on the research of electromagnetic structures for a complex wireless communication of a car with the environment and for covering the interior of a car by wireless services. This research inspired us to study probabilistic descriptions of fields in a closed space, enhanced our research of integral equations for the description of non-harmonic fields, and supported our activities in the area of wireless communication in bands of (sub)millimeter waves.
Other research activities will be focused on electromagnetic structures for the biomedical research (a cooperation with the University of Calabria), on electromagnetic structures for terahertz systems (a cooperation with Technische Universität Darmstadt), and on electromagnetic structures for satellite communication (a cooperation with the international organization AMSAT).
The planned fundamental research will cover the following areas:
- Theory of electromagnetic field. Attention will be turned to the descriptions of electromagnetic phenomena in the integral form and the differential form for generalized cases (non-harmonic fields, dispersive non-linear environments, inhomogeneous structures, etc.). In these descriptions, deterministic formulations are going to be replaced by probabilistic expressions. Descriptions will be formulated to obtain a suitable form for the consequent numerical solution. Descriptions will be composed such a way to comprise phenomena appearing at (sub)millimeter wavelengths and terahertz frequencies. We are going to answer questions related to the propagation of electromagnetic waves in various frequency bands and different environments.
- Optimization. In this area, we are going to continue the research of novel approaches to the computation of the Pareto front of optimal solutions and to formulate partial objectives in different domains. The investigated optimization approaches will be tested on the design of special electromagnetic structures developed for the operation in frequency bands of (sub)millimeter waves and terahertz frequencies (substrate integrated waveguides, semiconductor structures with the distributed amplification, etc.). We will search for novel, optimized solutions in the area of active microwave structures for generating, amplifying and processing signals.
- Computational electromagnetics. Investigated numerical and optimization methods have to be properly implemented. Our research is focused on methods of efficient parallelization of algorithms for analysis and optimization, on the exploitation of platforms with distributed computational power and on other potential approaches to the efficient processing of algorithms in multiple parallel processes.
In detail, the planned research is specified in the paragraph Time frame.
References
[1.1] DAVIDSON, D. B. Computational Electromagnetics for RF and Microwave Engineering, 2/E. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
[1.2] COLLETTE, Y., SIARRY, P. Multi-objective optimization: principles and case studies (decision engineering), 2/E. Heidelberg: Springer, 2013.
[1.3] HALL, P. S., HAO, Y. Antennas and propagation for body-centric wireless communications, 2/E. Norwood: Artech House, 2012.
[1.4] LEE, Y. S. Principles of terahertz science and technology. Heidelberg: Springer, 2009.
[1.5] High Intensity Radiated Field – Synthetic Environment. FP7 Collaborative Project, registration number: 205294, 2009-2013. Coordinator: Alenia Aeronautica.
http://www.hirf-se.eu
[1.6] Versatile, Integrated and Signal-Aware Technologies for Antennas (VISTA). COST project, registration number: IC1102. Coordinator: Aachen University of Technology. http://www.cost-vista.eu
[1.7] Antennas for Car2Car Communication. Research Contract, 2008 to 2011. Contractor: Volkswagen, A.G.
2.2 Investigating intelligent and software defined communication systems