Bernhard Walke

Bernhard H. Walke (born 28 July 1940) is a pioneer of mobile Internet access and professor emeritus at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. He is a driver of wireless and mobile 2G to 5G cellular radio networks technologies. In 1985 he proposed a local cellular radio network comprising technologies in use today in 2G to 4G and discussed for 5G systems, like self-organization of a radio mesh network, integration of circuit- and packet switching, de-centralized radio resource control, TDMA/spread spectrum data transmission, antenna beam steering, spatial beam multiplexing, interference coordination, S-Aloha based multiple access and demand assigned traffic channels, mobile broadband transmission using mm-waves, and multi-hop communication.

In 1991 he proposed CELLPAC for packet switching in GSM which triggered development of ETSI standard GPRS. GPRS air-interface protocols follow a 1993 version of CELLPAC. In 1999 he proposed fixed two-hop decode-and-forward relays for cellular radio, now mandatory in standards 3GPP LTE Rel.10 and IEEE 802.16.1 (mobile broadband WiMAX). The relay concept triggered evolution of cellular radio architecture towards 3GPP LTE Small Cell networks, e.g. femto and pico cells operating like relays on radio resources provided by a donor base station.

The Communications Networks (ComNets) research team in large parts designed theETSI/BRAN HiperLAN2 medium access control protocol adopted by standard IEEE 802.16 (WiMax) and used as a baseline in 3GPP LTE-Advanced. Radio spectrum requirements for packet-switching mobile radio systems were calculated by World Radio Conference 2007 using a queuing model developed by Walke and his team. Work by Walke and his team on wireless quality of service supporting multi-hop radio networks materialized in standard IEEE 802.11s.

Walke earned his Dipl. Ing. (M.Sc.) degree in Electrical Engineering and Data Processing (1965) from University of Stuttgart, Germany. He worked two years as a trainee with Telefunken and joined Telefunken Research (1967) where he received his doctorate (1975) from University of Stuttgart. As a department head in 1983 at AEG Telefunken (later taken-over in part by Airbus), he moved to FernUniversität Hagen, Germany as a professor for data processing techniques. During 1990-2007 he was professor and director of the School of Communications Networks (ComNets) at RWTH Aachen's Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology and thereafter (until 2017) head of the ComNets Research Group.

• IEEE Fellow 2016 "for contributions to packet switching and relaying in cellular mobile systems"
• ITG Award 1975 (Best annual paper award of Information Technology Society in VDE (Society of Electrical Engineers) in Germany)