University of Rostock

The main focus of this research area is the development of transmission concepts and coding schemes for communication systems. The research work concentrates on the physical layer and the data link layer (OSI layers 1 and 2). Here, state-of-the-art forward error correction schemes approach Shannon's channel capacity for point-to-point communications very closely. However, the practical implementation of these sophisticated concepts is still going on and needs further progress. Currently, spatial modulation with approximate message passing algorithms is one research focus.

Sensor networks are currently discussed for monitoring purposes in many different areas like ambient assisted living, smart cities or environmental protection. Although information theory is dealing with distributed compression techniques for many years, many questions still remain open. The information technology team is primarily working on the distributed compression with partial compression from an information theory point of view. Furthermore, implementation aspects shall be targeted in the future.

Besides theoretical works, a real-time hardware MIMO demonstrator is currently developed. Based on Ettus boards X410 and a millimeter wave extension up to 29 GHz, communications and sensing algorithms shall be developed and implemented with Gnuradio and Python.

Since a few years, signal processing for medical applications has become new research. Particularly, non-invasive instrumentation like electroimpedance tomography (EIT) is used to measure hemodynamic parameters like blood pressure or cardiac stroke volume. Estimation algorithms shall be developed based on machine learning with appropriate pre-processing of measurement data.