The ever greater advances in technology enable a multitude of pervasive computing applications:
Smart homes like the TUD's surPLUShome, for instance, enable the injection of energy into the power grid by intelligently managing the energy generated and consumed.
In logistics, the status of millions of items, containers or transporters is monitored in near real time to enable timely and well informed business decisions.
In disaster scenarios, emergency responders can better coordinate their actions through the support from autonomous robots and the additional information from infrastructure(less) wireless sensors.
Human activities can be monitored, e.g. to enable better tracking of fitness exercises, but also to follow the health course of the elderly, thereby reducing attention costs.

To enable the deployment of these applications, we at DVS work on different aspects of the distributed systems involved and their associated research challenges. While centered on the middleware and its subsystems, we look at the entire stack, spanning from the bottom-end, low-power tiny sensor node platforms, to the top-level delivery of meaningful services and data.
 

Current Projects

ukuFlow: Event- and Workflow-based Macroprogramming for Wireless Sensor Networks TUDμNet, a metropolitan-scale federation of wireless sensor network testbeds. myHealthAssistant: an Event-driven Middleware for Body and Ambient Sensor Networks CEACH: Configurable, Energy-efficient, Application- and Channel-aware Clustering Middleware Service for Sensor Networks A3ME, a light weight middleware for heterogeneous devices for self-description and information exchange. Scopes, a sensor network structuring mechanism TikiDB, a query processor supporting query scopes, based on TinyDB and Scopes and available for Contiki.

Research Partners

LOEWE Research Priority Program "Cooperative sensor communication = Cocoon" DFG research training group 1362 "Cooperative, Adaptive and Responsive Monitoring in Mixed Mode Environments" Embedded Sensing Systems Group

Completed Cooperation and Research Projects

• Data dissemination in pervasive environments
• Small footprint databases for handheld devices and cards
• Enhancing Remote Controlled Toys with Wireless Sensor Networks
• Towards Real-Time Enterprise Transparency: Business Processing at the Periphery (in cooperation with SAP)
• Internet-enabled vehicles