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Vehicular communications is not only a major opportunity to improve road safety and traffic efficiency but also a key enabler for connected and automated driving. The analysis of future automotive applications and their needs performed in the project 5G NetMobil has brought up various technical challenges that need to be solved in order to support advanced use cases such as High Density Truck Platooning. In this regard, we provide a description of several technical solutions developed within the project to respond to these arising communications demands in terms of reliability and latency. This includes a holistic E2E architecture comprising the concept of hybrid communications to achieve stringent reliability requirements, concepts for monitoring and controlling of QoS as well as network slicing and agile edge cloud concepts to shift parts of the vehicular functionality into the cloud. In addition to an overview of the activities within 5G NetMobil, this paper gives first interim results and insights.

The blockchain technology can be regarded as a groundbreaking invention with the potential to bring the digital revolution to the next stage by helping to realize peer economy solutions. The blockchain technology and the concept of blockchain immutability is discussed. The benefits of early standardization of the blockchain technology are argued based on the literature and the analysis of the central blockchain immutability characteristic. From this, a framework is proposed aimed at understanding the dimensions and boundaries of blockchain immutability. The resulting framework is suggested as a good practice standard for the implementation of blockchain systems. Based on these efforts, the article supports initiatives to better exploit the blockchain technology's full potential by standardization.

Wireless connectivity offers industrial automation the flexibility, mobility and reconfigurability it requires to cope with the new challenges of industry 4.0. Communication in industrial applications like factory automation (e. g. closed-loop control) imposes ambitious demands on wireless communication systems as these applications require very low latencies at ultra-high reliabilities. Additionally, the industrial environment encourages harsh channel conditions due to numerous metallic reflectors in typical factory halls. Since state of the art wireless technologies are not able to completely fulfill these requirements especially in industrial wireless channels, novel approaches are being developed. In that regard, Parallel Sequence Spread Spectrum (PSSS) transmission is seen as a promising technology as it allows transmission with very short latencies. Nevertheless, its bit error rate performance has not yet been analyzed for typical industrial wireless channels. This paper presents a PSSS system concept and two associated receiver structures which might be suitable for the targeted applications. A detailed mathematical description of the transmission of the PSSS signal in an additive white Gaussian noise channel and a time-dispersive channel is given. The performance of the system approach is analysed in industrial multipath-fading channels. Simulations show that the bit error rate curves of both receiver structures under consideration vary enormously for the considered channels. It can be shown that a multi-user detection receiver achieves better BER results than a single-user matched filter, but further ways of improvement need to be analysed.

Antenna Diversity is a method to improve the reliability of DAB reception in mobile environment leading to less spots with undesired audio interruptions and increased coverage areas.

Two different approaches for an automotive multi-and broadband monopole antenna for GSM, WLAN and UWB applications will be presented. Both allow covering the complete relevant frequency range worldwide in one antenna structure. The two antennas consist of one broadband structure for frequencies above 1.7 GHz and an additional folded arm for the lower frequencies. The first approach is based on a disc-monopole. In addition it has a folded arm on its top to cover the mobile phone services GSM 900 and AMPS. It has a height of 60 mm. The second approach has a 5 mm reduced height. So it achieves a height of 55 mm, which is the typical goal of many car manufacturers. The antenna is based on a folded metal strip construction. The amplitude and phase behaviour of the two antennas were measured. The derived impulse responses will be discussed with focus on the UWB frequencies.

The described DAB (digital audio broadcasting) receiver system, consisting of the analogue front-end and the digital baseband IC D-FIRE, offers the most compact receiver design available in the market today. Furthermore, the power consumption of the complete system is lass than 2 Watt in total for fullstream decoding, i.e., 1.7 Mbit/s. This paper describes the first true VLSI single chip solution for DAB. The D-FIRE (DAB-fully integrated receiver engine) is a 7 Mio. transistor chip fabricated in LSI logic 0.35 /spl mu/m process. Due to the on-chip ADC, RAM and audio decoder, no additional hardware is required for audio only applications. Extended with a 2 Mbit SRAM the maximum data-rate of 1.7 Mbit/s can be decoded while the system can dynamically follow a multiplex reconfiguration. This paper describes the architecture, some technical solutions and the features of the DAB receiver engine chip-set.