The annual ITG symposium on future perspectives of communication networks will this year focus on Self-Organization: Opportunities and Challenges. To be held in Stuttgart on October 7, it will cover a broad variety of topics and a well-balanced set of speakers, not only from academia but also from industry. The keynote speech will be given from the perspective of Deutsche Telekom. The strong industry participation highlights the timeliness and importance of the topic self-organization also in industry. Bettstetter will give a talk "Self-Organizing Synchronization: From Fireflies to Wireless Systems", which will also include a live synchronization experiment.

The mobile systems group at the University of Klagenfurt released a new flyer. It gives a quick overview of research and teaching activities, infrastructure, collaborations, awards, Lakeside Labs, and the European doctoral school ICE.

Download a high-res electronic version or order a free paper copy.

The International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems (IWSOS) serves as an annual multidisciplinary event dedicated to self-organization in networked systems. The fifth workshop of this series, to be held in Karlsruhe in February 2011, will feature research, challenge, and keynote talks on various aspects of self-organization in technological networks, including communication and computer networks, transportation networks, energy networks, and robot networks.

Full papers and challenge papers need to be submitted by September 26, 2010. The call for papers and further information about the event can be found at the Website iwsos2011.tm.kit.edu.

Together with Carlos Gershenson, Christian Bettstetter serves as technical program chair. A keynote will be given by Hermann Haken. The workshop will be hosted by Martina Zitterbart and her team.

The Lakeside Labs project Collaborative Microdrones performs research on networked unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their application to emergency and disaster response. Current work focuses on UAV routing, image stitching, and system integration.

The video on the right hand side (click to get a large view) demonstrates the following use case: An emergency response person specifies an area of interest in a map, and the system software computes appropriate waypoints and routes. Using GPS navigation, the UAVs autonomously overfly the specified area and deliver pictures to the ground station. The ground station runs an online image stitching algorithm creating a real-time update of the area map. In this way, the emergency assistants obtain an up-to-date overview image of the area. The service platform enables coordinated flights of multiple UAVs and is independent of the used UAV technology; it can also provide input to UAV simulations.

The daily newspaper Der Standard reports in its weekly science and technology section about cooperative relay communications in wireless systems. Based on an interview with Christian Bettstetter, the article "Gemeinsam gegen die Funkstille" explains that mobile devices could help each other to achieve higher energy efficiency and better radio coverage.

Since its foundation in the year 2007, the Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems (NES) has acquired 6.4 million Euro of third-party research funding, corresponding to a monthly rate of 50.000 EUR per professor. The grants and contracts include about 1.5 million from the EU, 1 million from national funds, 1 million from industry, and 2.5 million via the Lakeside Labs research cluster. By the end of this year, NES is expected to provide 40 full-time jobs, where 3/4 of the researchers are funded externally.

The research proposal "Robust Self-Organizing Slot Synchronization in Networked Embedded Systems" (for short: ROSSY) received a three-year full funding from the Austrian research funding agency FFG.

Our goal is to design and assess a robust self-organizing synchronization algorithm suited for wireless networked embedded systems. The algorithm operates in a completely distributed manner and is adaptive to changes in the network topology. Based on Bettstetter’s and his group's preliminary results in this area, the project deals with two issues: (a) The robustness of self-organized slot synchronization against faulty and malicious nodes. (b) The implementation and test of an improved algorithm in a programmable hardware platform. This work will be complemented with technical contributions to the modeling and performance assessment of self-organizing synchronization.

Johannes Klinglmayr will be hired for the project. He graduated from the University of Michigan (2008) and TU Wien (2007) and was winner of the Infineon scholarship 2006. In September 2008, he joined NES and the Lakeside Labs cluster in Klagenfurt, working toward his doctorate degree in self-organizing synchronization. An interview with him can he found here (bottom of page).

As part of her student project in the mobile systems group, Cam Lai Ngo developed and programmed the iPhone application BUZZflies. With this fun application, you can easily synchronize a set of iPhone devices in time and then let them play a song together, either a song from your library or a built-in song. BUZZflies is thus simulating a distributed loudspeaker. The synchronization is achieved by exchanging sound signals between the devices and employing and demonstrating a synchronization algorithm inspired from nature. The application is available free of charge at Apple's "App Store".

Cam Lai Ngo is a master student in information technology at the University of Klagenfurt. An interview about her experience and life in Klagenfurt, her project, and her goals for the future can be watched here.

The two professors Mario Huemer and Christian Bettstetter discussed with Reinhard Petschacher, CTO at Infineon Austria, about the topic of cooperation between industry and universities. How does cooperation start? How to achieve win-win situations? What are sensitive issues in such collaborations?

The dialog is part of the book Wissen schaffen, which illustrates the variety of research activities at the University of Klagenfurt. "Our goal was to create a book that people like to read", editor and vice president Menschik-Bendele explains, a book that is both illustrative and informative. On 168 pages, it covers projects, scientists, dialogs, and facts, accompanied by a large number of high-quality photos. (Photo: Johannes Puch).

Slot synchronization is an essential requirement in communication and control networks, used for medium access, scheduling of sleep phases, and collaborative sensing, to give some examples. Having been inspired by the biological phenomenon of synchronously flashing fireflies, a method for self-organizing slot synchronization suited for wireless systems has been developed. It is based on the theory of pulse-coupled oscillators, but goes beyond this theory by taking an engineering perspective and considering the inherent characteristics and capabilities of radio communications.

The basic idea is as follows: devices multiplex a synchronization word with each data packet; a receiving device that detects the known synchronization word adjusts its local clock according to some rule. A network-wide slot structure emerges seamlessly over time as devices exchange packets. In this way, a dedicated synchronization phase is avoided, making the method suited for dynamic meshed networks. These properties gave the method its name Meshed Emergent Firefly Synchronization (MEMFIS).

The MEMFIS concepts, architecture, and performance results will be published in a forthcoming article in the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

The proposal for the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate school Interactive and Cognitive Environments has been accepted for funding. This new training and research program will be offered by the University of Klagenfurt in cooperation with the University of Genoa (coordinator), UPC Barcelona, TU Eindhoven, and Queen Mary (University of London). The doctoral school is expected to offer ~40 PhD scholarships in five classes from fall 2010 until 2017.

Erasmus Mundus promotes scientific excellence and mobility in higher education in Europe. The selection process of the doctoral schools was very competitive: Out of about 150 proposals, 13 proposals have been selected. Klagenfurt is the only Austrian university participating in an Erasmus Mundus doctorate program.

A full week of discussions, talks, and group work on self-organizing networked systems is the concept of Research Days, organized for the second year by Lakeside Labs. Speakers included the experts Alain Barrat, Francis Heylighen, Hermann de Meer, Raissa D'Souza, and Marc Timme, along with other guests, Lakeside Labs professors, and researchers. Major discussion topics included robustness in self-organizing systems, modeling of self-organizing systems, and courses for university education in the area of self-organizing networked systems.

Lakeside Labs hosted a one-day international workshop with presentations and discussions on cooperation and self-organization in communication networks (July 29). The program included keynote speeches, project overviews, research talks and demonstrations. The workshop was part of the 30th meeting of the VDE/ITG working group "IP and Mobility". Further information can be found here.

The content of this website has been visualized in terms of a word cloud. Simply click on the preview on the right hand side or here. The cloud nicely illustrates Bettstetter's research and teaching topics, collaborators, conferences, and working places. The more frequently a word appears on the website, the larger it appears in the cloud. The cloud was created using the Web application Wordle.

A further word cloud is about the NES institute.

The publication "Multi-Hop-Aware Cooperative Relaying" by Helmut Adam, Christian Bettstetter, and Sidi Mohammed Senouci received the Best Student Paper Award at the 69th IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC).

Helmut Adam is working towards his dissertation in the area of cooperative relaying, a new wireless communication technique promising significant gains in throughput and energy-efficiency. The awarded paper proposes a concept to exploit routing information in the relay selection protocol. The work is an outcome of a bilateral project between the University of Klagenfurt and France Telecom's Orange Labs.

VTC is the semiannual conference of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society. VTC Spring 2009 took place in Barcelona from 26 to 29 April 2009, featuring 656 research papers, several panels and invited talks.

The Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems (NES) of the University of Klagenfurt released its annual report 2008. The 100-pages brochure summarizes the major activities of the NES institute in research and teaching. "The second year of existence [..] was a very important one for us," institute head Christian Bettstetter says. "We had to reflect on the starting phase and think about what went well and what needs to be improved." The number of scientific staff members rose from 14 to 25, and the team became truly international, with researchers coming from Austria, Belarus, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Macedonia, Portugal, and Turkey.

Crisostomo, Schilcher, Bettstetter and Barros recently studied a fundamental question related to probabilistic flooding in random networks. Modeling a network as a random graph with given link probability between nodes, they ask: What is the minimum message forwarding probability of the nodes such that a flooding message reaches each network node with high probability? The authors derive bounds for this probability and show by simulation that these bounds are tight. The results will be published and presented at the IEEE Intern. Conf. on Communications (ICC) taking place in Dresden in June 2009. A preprint of the paper, titled "Analysis of probabilistic flooding: How do we choose the right coin?" is available for download.

Christian Bettstetter has been elevated to the grade of Senior Member in the IEEE, one of the world's largest professional associations for the advancement of technology. About 12% of all 382,000 members hold this grade, which requires significant professional maturity and achievements. Christian joined the IEEE in 1998 and is currently serving as program committee member of several major IEEE conferences, such as IEEE ICC and IEEE GLOBECOM.

The Networked and Embedded Systems institute was evaluated with help of three external university professors based on a self-assessment report and a two-day visit. The peers are "positively surprised and impressed by the scientific productivity, the success in teaching and institute management achieved in short time".

The Lakeside Labs project cDrones aims at advancing the state-of-the-art in the domain of collaborative, networked microdrones. We develop algorithms, concepts, and methods for three key technological areas: flight formation, mission planning and control, and sensor data interpretation. Although the developed technology should be of general applicability, we focus on networked microdrones for fire rescue scenarios.

At Austria's long night of research on November 8, 2008, several night flights were presented to a large audience. The station won the second audience price out of 55 competitors in Klagenfurt.

A demonstration video is available. The funded project started officially on January 1, 2009.

A fully updated, third edition of GSM: Architecture, Protocols, and Services written by Eberspächer, Vögel, Bettstetter, and Hartmann is out now. The book is both an introductory textbook for graduate students and a reference resource for telecommunications engineers and researchers.

Special features include a detailed introduction to the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and EDGE for packet-switched services and a description of multimedia messaging (MMS). New content also includes capacity enhancement methods like sectorization, the application of adaptive antennas for Spatial Filtering for Interference Reduction (SFIR) and Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA)

Alexander Tyrrell, Gunther Auer, and Christian Bettstetter received an award for the best paper with a doctorate student as main author. The award was issued at the Intern. Symp. on Applied Sciences in Biomedical and Commun. Techn. in Denmark. The awarded paper "On the accuracy of firefly synchronization with delays" investigates distributed synchronization applied to a wireless mesh network.

Udo Schilcher, and Michael Gyarmati, Christian Bettstetter received the best paper award at the 67th IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference. The awarded publication "Measuring Inhomogeneity in Spatial Distributions" has been written together with Yun W. Chung and Young H. Kim from Seoul, Korea, within a common project on modeling and simulation of wireless systems. The scientists address the question as to how inhomogeneity in spatial user distributions can be defined. The proposed mathematical model was also compared with human intuition of inhomogeneity, using a Web survey.

Out of 1.536 submissions, 379 papers have been accepted to be presented in Singapore from May 11-14, 2008. Further 234 poster presentations took place. A second best paper award was given to researchers from MIT and Kyung Hee University.

It was the first conference presentation for Schilcher - a great start. "I didn't expect at all that we receive this award," project leader and advisor Bettstetter says. Gyarmati is already writing on a new paper that studies how inhomogeneity will change over time in case of random user mobility.