Marco Zimmerling

I am an independent research group leader at TU Dresden, where I am heading the Networked Embedded Systems Lab within the Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden. My research interests are in the area of cyber-physical systems, with a focus on wireless embedded systems. Overall, I aim at designing and building real systems that are provably dependable, highly adaptive, and sustainable by design.

I completed my PhD in computer engineering in 2015 at ETH Zurich in the group of Lothar Thiele. I hold a diploma degree in computer science from TU Dresden. For doing my diploma thesis, I visited the groups of Thiemo Voigt at RISE Kista and Per Gunningberg at Uppsala University. Taking a break from my studies, I interned at IBM for more than a year, including a six-month stay at the T.J. Watson Research Center.

You may follow me on Twitter or drop me an email at marco zimmerling at tu-dresden.de to contact me directly. If you would like to find out more about myself and my work, please take a look at my:

Curriculum vitæ
Summary of key achievement #1: Taking advantage of packet collisions
Summary of key achievement #2: System-wide coordination with guarantees
Summary of key achievement #3: Closing the loop
Selected publications (complete list)
Google Scholar profile

Besides research, I enjoy my three kids, running, fishing, cooking, hiking, and reading books.

News

Mar 3, 2021

We have released the artifacts (hardware designs, source code, etc.) of our NSDI'21 paper on enabling efficient device-to-device communication in battery-free networks.

Feb 2, 2021

I am happy to join the editorial board of JSys, a new diamond open-access journal with several innovative features (e.g., no page limits, 6 weeks turn-around time).

Jan 6, 2021

I am happy to serve on the technical program committee of SenSys'21. Note that the submission deadline will be later than in previous years (around late May, early June).

Dec 12, 2020

Our paper on battery-free networks has been accepted at NSDI'21. Stay tuned for paper, code, and hardware design specs!

Nov 26, 2020

I am happy to serve on the technical program committee of MobiSys'21. Don't forget to register your abstract by Jan 8, 2021! Full papers are due one week later.

Oct 12, 2020

Our article reviewing the state of the art and opportunities for future research in wireless control for smart manufacturing will appear in the Proceedings of the IEEE.

Selected Recent Peer-Reviewed Publications

Full Publication List

Kai Geissdoerfer and Marco Zimmerling. Bootstrapping Battery-free Wireless Networks: Efficient Neighbor Discovery and Synchronization in the Face of Intermittency. In Proceedings of the 18th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Online, April 2021.
Dominik Baumann, Fabian Mager, Ulf Wetzker, Lothar Thiele, Marco Zimmerling, and Sebastian Trimpe. Wireless Control for Smart Manufacturing: Recent Approaches and Open Challenges. Proceedings of the IEEE. To appear.
Marco Zimmerling, Luca Mottola, and Silvia Santini. Synchronous Transmissions in Low-Power Wireless: A Survey of Communication Protocols and Network Services. ACM Computing Surveys. Volume 53, Issue 6. December 2020.
Romain Jacob, Licong Zhang, Marco Zimmerling, Jan Beutel, Samarjit Chakraborty, and Lothar Thiele. The Time-Triggered Wireless Architecture. In Proceedings of the 32nd Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS), Online, July 2020.
Kai Geissdoerfer, Mikolaj Chwalisz, and Marco Zimmerling. Shepherd: A Portable Testbed for the Batteryless IoT. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), New York (NY, USA), November 2019.
Fabian Mager, Dominik Baumann, Romain Jacob, Lothar Thiele, Sebastian Trimpe, and Marco Zimmerling. Feedback Control Goes Wireless: Guaranteed Stability over Low-power Multi-hop Networks. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS), Montreal (QC, Canada), April 2019. [presentation] Best Paper Award.

Selected Honors and Awards

Future Prize (2nd place), Ewald Marquardt Foundation, 2019
Best Paper Award, ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS), 2019
Best Demo Award, ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2019
DFG Emmy Noether Grant (1.7 million Euro for 5 years), 2018
EDAA Outstanding Dissertation Award, 2016
ACM SIGBED Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award, 2015
Best Paper Award, ACM Int. Conf. on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2013
Best Paper Runner-Up, ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2012
Best Paper Award, ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2011
Best M.Sc. Thesis Award, Int. School on Cyber-Physical and Sensor Networks (SensorNets), 2009

Open Source

I make research artifacts available as open source whenever possible:

The model implementation, firmware source code, and hardware design files of our work on enabling efficient device-to-device communication in battery-free wireless networks is available on GitHub.
The hardware and software architecture of Shepherd, a portable testbed for accurately recording and replaying high-resolution spatio-temporal energy-harvesting traces, is available on GitHub.
The code we used to experimentally evaluate our work on fast feedback control and coordination over multi-hop low-power wireless networks is available on GitHub.
The source code of Time-Triggered Wireless (TTW), an architecture for wireless real-time and cyber-physical systems with support for multiple operating modes, is available on GitHub.
The Mixer many-to-all broadcast primitive for dynamic wireless mesh networks is available on GitLab.
The wireless bus communication architecture, embodied by LWB and Glossy, is available on GitHub.
The Glossy protocol for network flooding and time synchronization is available on Contiki projects.
The BLEach IPv6-over-BLE stack is available on GitHub, more information on development status here.
The Chaos primitive for all-to-all data sharing and in-network processing is availabe on GitHub.
Information on how to construct customized embedded dual-processor platforms around the Bolt interconnect, including design files, firmware, and example device drivers, is available here.
The Staffetta smart duty-cycling mechanism for opportunistic data collection is available on GitHub.
The pTunes framework for runtime adaptation of MAC protocol parameters is available on GitHub.

Contact

Email: marco zimmerling at tu-dresden.de
Phone: +49 351 463 43728
Fax: +49 351 463 39995

Visiting Address:
TU Dresden
Networked Embedded Systems Lab
Helmholtzstrasse 18, BAR II59
01187 Dresden

Mailing Address:
TU Dresden
cfaed – S7A
01062 Dresden, Germany