Seminar

Driven by the requirements of innovative applications and services, the past few years have produced new technologies for networked or distributed systems. In the Internet of Things, a large number of devices and everyday objects equipped with sensors and actuators are connected to the internet and communicate through mostly wireless communication technologies (e.g., BLE, ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, LoRaWAN). In one of its sub-domains, the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT, Industry 4.0), machines, tools, transport equipment, etc. are networked.
Virtualisation (e.g., NFV) and "software-defined" systems (e.g., SDN), increase the flexiblity and efficiency of distributed systems through dynamic adaptation and scaling.
Driven by the popularity of the Bitcoin system, distributed ledger technologies and related concepts such as smart contracts have been developed, which are not only the foundations of electronic currencies, but can also support any application in which a consensus between different parties must be reached and documented. 
Another focus has been the reduction of latency in networked and distributed systems, e.g. by using nearby edge and fog computing resources in addition to the remote cloud, or by using optimised communication protocols to., for instance, rapidly connect client and server. 
In addition to stationary networks, mobile (5G) communication technologies and systems have developed rapidly. For example, the Covid-19 tracing application uses mobile devices to track contacts. This method, known as crowdsensing, can be used more generally to collect large amounts of geographically distributed sensor data. 

This seminar will discuss a wide range of current technologies, protocols and standards that enable the above networked and distributed applications and services.

Organization: The seminar is organized in the style of a scientific conference. Following the submission of a written paper on the assigned topic, students write reviews for other seminar papers and participate in a final presentation session where they present their work and discuss the work of others. Attendance at the kick-off and final presentation session is mandatory.

Prerequisite: Successful completion of at least 1 course at the department of Distributed Systems is highly recommended.

Melanie Heck

The Internet of Everything (IoE), where virtually everything can now communicate through the Internet, and the increasingly demanding performance requirements of new technologies (e.g., cryptocurrencies) have driven the emergence of new computing paradigms for distributed systems. Scalability is now offered not only by centralized cloud providers, but also by edge computing systems, where geographically distributed servers provide computational resources at the edge of the network and, therefore, close to the end devices. This can significantly reduce latency for time-critical applications like vehicular networks. The advances in edge computing have led to the emergence of edge AI, where powerful AI algorithms are deployed at the edge, without relying on a remote cloud.

But distributed systems come with many challenges which requires a profound understanding of core principles in distributed computing. As pointed out by former Google Senior Vice President Urs Hölzl: “At scale, everything breaks ... Keeping things simple and yet scalable is actually the biggest challenge. It's really, really hard.“ This is especially true for dynamic and uncertain environments that we are facing, for instance, in smart buildings or smart energy systems. Self-adaptation is one of the key mechanisms for coping with increasingly large and dynamic systems, often by using machine learning techniques (GNN, reinforcement learning). Challenges that come with distributed storage systems include consistency and scalability.

Another hot topic, especially in the context of 5G and the development of future 6G networks, is Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), which defines a set of standards to enable reliable, deterministic real-time communication in Ethernet networks. These standards target, among others, time synchronization and traffic shaping/scheduling approaches for both event-based and time-triggered traffic.

In this seminar, we take a deep dive into specific concepts of distributed and context-aware systems that tackle the above challenges.  The topics will be published on the department’s website and are assigned according to a standardized procedure as explained during the kick-off.

Organization: The seminar is organized in the style of a scientific conference. Following the submission of a written paper on the assigned topic, students write reviews for other seminar papers and participate in a final presentation session where they present their work and discuss the work of others. Attendance at the kick-off and final presentation session is mandatory.

Prerequisite: Successful completion of at least 1 Master-level course at the department of Distributed Systems is highly recommended.

Melanie Heck