Marco Zimmerling

I am a full professor at the Faculty of Engineering at University of Freiburg, where I am heading the Networked Embedded Systems Lab within the Department of Computer Science. My research interests are in the area of cyber-physical systems, with a focus on wireless embedded systems. Overall, I aim at designing real systems that are provably dependable, highly adaptive, and sustainable by design.

Previously, I was a research group leader at the Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden at TU Dresden. 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 my diploma thesis project, 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 zimmerling at cs.uni-freiburg.de to contact me directly. If you would like to find out more about myself and my research, please take a look at my:

Curriculum vitæ
Summary of key achievement #1: Embracing packet collisions
Summary of key achievement #2: End-to-end guarantees
Summary of key achievement #3: Distributed battery-free systems
Selected publications (complete list)
Google Scholar profile

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

News

Oct 4, 2022

Our paper on RSSISpy, a software tool for continuous RSSI measurements on COTS hardware, has received the EWSN 2022 Best Paper Award. See here for the code.

July 14, 2022

Two papers accepted at EWSN! One on inspecting concurrent transmissions in the wild (RSSISpy), and one on making low-power wireless more fault tolerant (Butler).

May 4, 2022

I am honored to receive the ACM SIGBED Early Career Researcher Award 2022! This is also an amazing recognition of our group's research over the past few years.

Apr 4, 2022

Our paper on effective communication between battery-free, intermittently powered devices has received the NSDI 2022 Community Award.

Apr 1, 2022

I have joined the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Freiburg as a full professor in the Department of Computer Science.

Mar 25, 2022

We have released the artifacts (energy-harvesting traces, source code, etc.) of our NSDI'22 paper on battery-free device-to-device communication.

Mar 14, 2022

I am organizing a Dagstuhl seminar on emerging Internet of Things scenarios (in-body, underwater, outer space, etc.) together with Kyle, Longfei, and Xia to be held in 2023.

Feb 25, 2022

Together with Sebastian Trimpe, I will have the pleasure talk about our work on wireless control at ETHZ/EPFL on February 28 and at TU Darmstadt on March 18.

Selected Recent Peer-Reviewed Publications

Full Publication List

Carsten Herrmann and Marco Zimmerling. RSSISpy: Inspecting Concurrent Transmissions in the Wild. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN), Linz (Austria), October 2022. Best Paper Award.
Kai Geissdoerfer and Marco Zimmerling. Learning to Communicate Effectively Between Battery-free Devices. In Proceedings of the 19th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Renton (WA, USA), April 2022. Community Award.
Fabian Mager, Dominik Baumann, Carsten Herrmann, Sebastian Trimpe, and Marco Zimmerling. Scaling Beyond Bandwidth Limitations: Wireless Control With Stability Guarantees Under Overload. ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems. Volume 6, Issue 3. July 2022.
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. Volume 109, Issue 4. April 2021.
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.
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

ACM SIGBED Early Career Researcher Award, 2022
Community Award, USENIX Symp. on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2022
Best Paper Award, Int. Conf. on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN), 2022
Future Prize, 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

Open Source

I make research artifacts available as open source whenever possible:

RSSISpy, a software module that enables continuous RSSI measurements with bit-level resolution on the popular Nordic nRF52840 in parallel to regular packet receptions, is available on GitLab.
TrafficBench, a tool suit that facilitates the experimental exploration of concurrent transmissions on commercial off-the-shelf low-power wireless devices, is available on GitLab.
Butler, a lightweight and distributed synchronization mechanism for increasing the availability of low-power wireless communication protocols, is available on GitLab.
The Bonito protocol for battery-free device-to-device communication is available on GitHub.
The model implementation, firmware source code, and hardware design files of our work on neighbor discovery and synchronization in distributed battery-free systems 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 implementation of TriScale, the first systematic methodology that streamlines the design and analysis of performance evaluations, is available here, including examples and presentation slides.
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: zimmerling at cs.uni-freiburg.de
Phone: +49 761 203 95382

University of Freiburg
Networked Embedded Systems Lab
Georges-Köhler-Allee 51, Room 03 004
79110 Freiburg, Germany