
Marco ZimmerlingTechnische Universität Dresden | TUD
Marco Zimmerling
PhD in Computer Engineering
About
82
Publications
21,260
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2,270
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
My research focuses on reliable and efficient wireless communication and runtime systems for building dependable cyber-physical systems.
Additional affiliations
November 2009 - present
Publications
Publications (82)
An important class of cyber-physical systems relies on multiple agents that jointly perform a task by coordinating their actions over a wireless network. Examples include self-driving cars in intelligent transportation and production robots in smart manufacturing. However, the scalability of existing control-over-wireless solutions is limited as th...
An important class of cyber-physical systems relies on multiple agents that jointly perform a task by coordinating their actions over a wireless network. Examples include self-driving cars in intelligent transportation and production robots in smart manufacturing. However, the scalability of existing control-over-wireless solutions is limited as th...
Due to their favorable size, cost, and sustainability, battery-free devices are preferable in various applications. However, battery-free devices operate only intermittently since ambient energy sources, such as light and radio-frequency signals, are often too weak to continuously power the devices. This paper addresses the unsolved problem of effi...
Collaboration of batteryless devices is essential to their success in replacing traditional battery-based systems. Without significant energy storage, spatio-temporal fluctuations of ambient energy availability become critical for the correct functioning of these systems. We present Shepherd, a testbed for the batteryless Internet of Things (IoT) t...
Low-power wireless communication is a central building block of cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things. Conventional low-power wireless protocols make avoiding packet collisions a cornerstone design choice. The concept of synchronous transmissions challenges this view. As collisions are not necessarily destructive, under specific circums...
Smart manufacturing aims to overcome the limitations of today's rigid assembly lines by making the material flow and manufacturing process more flexible, versatile, and scalable. The main economic drivers are higher resource and cost efficiency as the manufacturers can more quickly adapt to changing market needs and also increase the lifespan of th...
Smart manufacturing aims to overcome the limitations of today's rigid assembly lines by making the material flow and manufacturing process more flexible, versatile, and scalable. The main economic drivers are higher resource and cost efficiency as the manufacturers can more quickly adapt to changing market needs and also increase the lifespan of th...
Communication among batteryless devices is key to their success in replacing traditional battery-supported systems.
However, low and unpredictable availability of ambient energy combined with limited energy storage capacity of the devices make efficient communication challenging.
As a stepping stone toward addressing this challenge, we propose to l...
Wirelessly interconnected sensors, actuators, and controllers promise greater flexibility, lower installation and maintenance costs, and higher robustness in harsh conditions than wired solutions. However, to facilitate the adoption of wireless communication in cyber-physical systems (CPS), the functional and non-functional properties must be simil...
Low-power wireless communication is a central building block of Cyber-physical Systems and the Internet of Things. Conventional low-power wireless protocols make avoiding packet collisions a cornerstone design choice. The concept of synchronous transmissions challenges this view. As collisions are not necessarily destructive, under specific circums...
Closing feedback loops fast and over long distances is key to emerging cyber-physical applications; for example, robot motion control and swarm coordination require update intervals of tens of milliseconds. Low-power wireless communication technology is preferred for its low cost, small form factor, and flexibility, especially if the devices suppor...
Collaboration of batteryless nodes is essential to their success in replacing traditional battery-based systems. Energy-harvesting sensor nodes experience spatio-temporal fluctuations of energy availability. These fluctuations become especially critical when sensor nodes do not have sufficient energy storage to compensate for them. Understanding th...
Collaboration of batteryless nodes is essential to their success in replacing traditional battery-based systems. This abstract describes a demonstration of the recently proposed Shepherd testbed that allows to record and reproduce spatio-temporal characteristics of real energy environments. It consists of a number of spatially distributed Shepherd...
Closing feedback loops fast and over long distances is key to emerging cyber-physical applications; for example, robot motion control and swarm coordination require update intervals of tens of milliseconds. Low-power wireless communication technology is preferred for its low cost, small form factor, and flexibility, especially if the devices suppor...
describes the first public demonstration of feedback control and coordination of multiple physical systems over a dynamic multi-hop low-power wireless network with update intervals of tens of milliseconds. Our running system can dynamically change between different sets of application tasks (e.g., sensing, actuation, control) executing on the spati...
In future autonomous systems, wireless multi-hop communication is key to enable collaboration among distributed agents at low cost and high flexibility. When many agents need to transmit information over the same wireless network, communication becomes a shared and contested resource. Event-triggered and self-triggered control account for this by t...
In future autonomous systems, wireless multi-hop communication is key to enable collaboration among distributed agents at low cost and high flexibility. When many agents need to transmit information over the same wireless network, communication becomes a shared and contested resource. Event-triggered and self-triggered control account for this by t...
Careful energy management is a prerequisite for long-term, unattended operation of solar-harvesting sensing systems. We observe that in many applications the utility of sensed data varies over time, but current energy-management algorithms do not exploit prior knowledge of these variations for making better decisions. This paper presents PreAct, th...
Closing feedback loops fast and over long distances is key to emerging applications; for example, robot motion control and swarm coordination require update intervals of tens of milliseconds. Low-power wireless technology is preferred for its low cost, small form factor, and flexibility, especially if the devices support multi-hop communication. So...
This abstract describes the first public demonstration of feedback control and coordination of multiple physical systems over a dynamic multi-hop low-power wireless network with update intervals of tens of milliseconds. Our running system can dynamically change between different sets of application tasks (e.g., sensing, actuation, control) executin...
Making experimental research on low-power wireless networking repeatable, reproducible, and comparable is a long overdue step that hinders a wide acceptance of this technology within the industry. In this paper, we start to fill this gap by proposing and applying
a well-defined methodology that specifies how to plan and execute experiments, as well...
Making experimental research on low-power wireless networking repeatable, reproducible, and comparable is a long overdue step that hinders a wide acceptance of this technology within the industry. In this paper, we start to fill this gap by proposing and applying a well-defined methodology that specifies how to plan and execute experiments, as well...
The Low-Power Wireless Bus (LWB) is a communication protocol for low-power wireless multi-hop networks that was published in 2012. It provides a shared-bus abstraction for higher layer protocols and hides the complexity of the underlying network. Internally, LWB uses fast and reliable Glossy floods to exchange information within the network, thus s...
Many-to-all communication is a prerequisite for many applications and network services, including distributed control and data replication. However, current solutions do not meet the scalability and latency requirements of emerging applications. This paper presents Mixer, a many-to-all broadcast primitive for dynamic wireless mesh networks. Mixer i...
Motivated by multi-hop communication in unreliable wireless networks, we present a percolation theory for time-varying networks. We develop a renormalization group theory for a prototypical network on a regular grid,
where individual links switch stochastically between active and inactive states. The question whether a given source node can communi...
Simulation tools and testbeds have been proposed to assess the performance of control designs and wireless protocols in isolation. A cyber-physical system (CPS), however, integrates control with network elements, which must be evaluated together under real-world conditions to assess control performance, stability, and associated costs. We present a...
Closing feedback loops fast and over long distances is key to emerging applications; for example, robot motion control and swarm coordination require update intervals below 100 ms. Low-power wireless is preferred for its flexibility, low cost, and small form factor, especially if the devices support multi-hop communication. Thus far, however, close...
Closing feedback loops fast and over long distances is key to emerging applications; for example, robot motion control and swarm coordination require update intervals below 100 ms. Low-power wireless is preferred for its flexibility, low cost, and small form factor, especially if the devices support multi-hop communication. Thus far, however, close...
We sketch our ongoing work toward the first design, implementation, and evaluation of a low-power embedded system providing reliable wireless feedback control of several distributed processes over multiple hops with update rates of 10 Hz or higher.
Simulation tools and testbeds have been proposed to assess the performance of control designs and wireless protocols in isolation. A cyber-physical system (CPS), however, integrates control with network elements, which must be evaluated together under real-world conditions to assess control performance, stability , and associated costs. We present...
Wired field buses have proved their effectiveness to support Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). However, in avionics, for ease of deployment, or for new functionality featuring mobile devices, there is a strong interest for wireless solutions. Low-power wireless protocols have been proposed, but requirements of a large class of CPS applications can stil...
This paper introduces Stalwart, a novel system design for wireless Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) including a scheduling framework that provides real-time guarantees, minimizes end-to-end latency between application tasks, minimizes communication energy, and ensures safety in terms of conflict-free communication.
The ability to fine-tune communication performance is key to meeting the requirements of Internet of Things applications. While years of low-power wireless research now allows developers to fully optimize the performance of applications built on top of IEEE 802.15.4, this has not yet happened with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), whose networking perfor...
Many applications such as autonomous swarming drones and system services like data replication need to exchange data among many or all nodes in a network. However, wireless many-to-many broadcast has thus far only been studied theoretically or in simulation , and practical solutions hardly meet the requirements of emerging applications, especially...
Emerging applications like wireless control or drone swarms require low-latency communication across multiple hops among a large number of both static and mobile devices. Recent protocols based on synchronous transmissions can meet most of these requirements. In particular, Glossy comes extremely close to the minimum lower latency bound for floodin...
We consider a device-to-device wireless multi-hop communication scenario with resource-constrained devices that require energy-efficient connectivity. Based on the recently proposed Glossy network flooding protocol, we develop both centralized and distributed beam-forming and power control algorithms, and analyze their performance. The proposed sch...
Low-power wireless technology promises greater flexibility and lower costs in cyber-physical systems. To reap these benefits, communication protocols must deliver packets reliably within real-time deadlines across resource-constrained devices, while adapting to changes in application requirements (e.g., traffic demands) and network state (e.g., lin...
In this demonstration, we present a prototype of a cross- technology communication (CTC) system that allows a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) device to directly send data to a Wi-Fi device using commodity hardware. Towards this goal, we use energy burst patterns to encode information on overlapping channel frequencies. With this demonstration, we prove...
In this demonstration, we present a prototype of a cross-technology communication (CTC) system that allows a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) device to directly send data to a Wi-Fi device using commodity hardware. Towards this goal, we use energy burst patterns to encode information on overlapping channel frequencies. With this demonstration , we prove...
A Benchmark for Low-power Wireless Networking
Experimental research in low-power wireless networking lacks a reference benchmark. While other communities such as databases or machine learning have standardized benchmarks, our community still uses ad-hoc setups for its experiments and struggles to provide a fair comparison between communication protocols. Reasons for this include the diversity...
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) use distributed feedback loops to control physical processes. Designing practical distributed CPS controllers often benefits from a logically centralized approach, where each node computes the control law locally based on global knowledge of the system state. We present Mixer, an all-to-all communication scheme that ena...
Opportunistic routing protocols tackle the problem of efficient data collection in dynamic wireless sensor networks, where the radio is duty-cycled to save energy and the topology changes unpredictably due to node mobility and/or link dynamics. Unlike protocols that maintain a routing structure, in opportunistic protocols nodes forward packets to a...
The ever-growing proliferation of wireless devices and technologies used for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as patient monitoring, military surveillance, and industrial automation and control, has created an increasing need for methods and tools for connectivity prediction, information flow monitoring, and failure analysis to increase...
The wireless sensor network community is currently undergoing a platform paradigm shift, moving away from classical single-processor motes toward heterogeneous multi-processor architectures. These emerging platforms promise efficient concurrent processing with energy-proportional system performance. The use of shared interconnects and shared memory...
We demonstrate the capabilities of Bolt, an ultra-low-power processor interconnect for the composable construction of new multi-processor wireless embedded platforms. Bolt provides asynchronous bidirectional communication between two processors with predictable message transfer times. In this way, Bolt solves the resource interference problem inher...
Resource interference is a fundamental barrier to realizing predictable wireless embedded systems. We address this problem by (i) partitioning application and communication tasks onto dedicated platforms, and (ii) designing a platform interconnect to facilitate asynchronous message exchange with predictable run-time behavior. We motivate the need f...
Experiments under controlled radio interference are crucial to assess the robustness of low-power wireless protocols. While tools such as JamLab augment existing sensornet testbeds with realistic interference, it remains an error-prone and time-consuming task to manually select the set of nodes acting as jammers and their individual transmit powers...
We demonstrate the design and implementation of a prototype hardware/software architecture for automatic single-word speech recognition on resource-constrained embedded devices. Designed as a voice-activated extension of an existing wireless nurse call system, our prototype device continually listens for a pre-recorded keyword, and uses speech reco...
Traditional low-power wireless protocols maintain distributed network state to cope with link dynamics. Modeling the protocol operation as a function of network state is difficult as the state is frequently updated in an uncoordinated fashion. Recent protocols use synchronous transmissions (ST): multiple nodes send simultaneously towards the same r...
We present the design of a reliable nurse call system based on wireless embedded devices and multi-hop protocols. Our work is motivated by the need for such system during annual summer camps for people with muscular dystrophy and the lack of suitable alternative solutions. We describe how our prototype meets the reliability and real-time requiremen...
An important building block for low-power wireless systems is to efficiently share and process data among all devices in a network. However, current approaches typically split such all-to-all interactions into sequential collection, processing, and dissemination phases, thus handling them inefficiently.
We introduce Chaos, the first primitive that...
By integrating computational and physical elements through feedback loops, CPSs implement a wide range of safety-critical applications, from high-confidence medical systems to critical infrastructure control. Deployed systems must therefore provide highly dependable operation against unpredictable real-world dynamics. However, common CPS hardware-c...
Mathematical models play a pivotal role in understanding and designing advanced low-power wireless systems. However, the distributed and uncoordinated operation of traditional multi-hop low-power wireless protocols greatly complicates their accurate modeling. This is mainly because these protocols build and maintain substantial network state to cop...
Testbeds are indispensable for debugging and evaluating wireless embedded systems. While existing testbeds provide ample opportunities for realistic, large-scale experiments, they are limited in their ability to closely observe and control the distributed operation of resource-constrained nodes - access to the nodes is restricted to the serial port...
We present the Low-Power Wireless Bus (LWB), a communication protocol that supports several traffic patterns and mobile nodes immersed in static infrastructures. LWB turns a multi-hop low-power wireless network into an infrastructure similar to a shared bus, where all nodes are potential receivers of all data. It achieves this by mapping all traffi...
We argue in this paper that CaptureCom closes the control loop in wireless CPS: it provides efficient collection, processing (in our example aggregation), and dissemination within the network, making it suitable for widespread control applications. Our initial evaluation shows that CaptureCom efficiently exploits spacial diversity. It converges wit...
Developing, testing, debugging, and evaluating communication protocols for low-power wireless networks is a long and cumbersome task. Simulators can be helpful in the early stages of development, but their models of hardware components and the wireless channel are often rather simplistic and hence cannot substitute experiments on real sensor node p...