SFB 876

The collaborative research center SFB876 brings together data mining and embedded systems. On the one hand, embedded systems can be further improved using machine learning. On the other hand, data mining algorithms can be realized in hardware, e.g. FPGAs, or run on GPGPUs. The restrictions of ubiquitous systems in computing power, memory, and energy demand new algorithms for known learning tasks. These resource bounded learning algorithms may also be applied on extremely large data bases on servers.

DFG-Forschergruppe

Following the liberalization of electricity markets and the increasing use of renewable energies, the electric transmission networks in Europe are operated closer to their limits. To ensure the safety and reliability of the operation to be maintained under these stringent requirements, explores the DFG research group at the Technical University of Dortmund in 1511 innovative protection and process control applications, in particular by avoiding large-scale system failures (blackouts). Objective of the research group is to develop a coherent long-range solution for system monitoring and protection of electrical energy systems, ranging from new algorithms through to information and communication technology implementation. Protection and control functions for producers of network configurations, transmission corridors and the coordinated power flow control arise from this cross-disciplinary research of nine research institutes from electrical engineering, information technology, computer science and statistics. In a joint new hybrid simulator to be explored for energy and ICT systems each developed concept will be examined holistically and validated using realistic energy supply scenarios.

EU Projects

In the research project e-Dash ("Electricity Demand and Supply Harmonization for EVs"), partly funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission, the potential of virtual aggregation of large OEM specific EV fleets (Brand Fleets) is investigated. A major goal of the project is to establish the EV fleet manager as natural participant in the energy market by dealing with the EV fleet's capacity at the OTC, Day-Ahead as well as Intra-Day energy trading markets (e.g. EEX in Leipzig, Germany). An OEM specific and EV optimized Over-the-Air (OTA) Telematics Interface is developed enabling the fleet manager to optimize the utilization of the EV fleet as well as capacity or load provisioning to the grid. This near real-time fleet monitoring may ultimately optimize the energy trading processes and allow for more efficient utilization of EV battery capacities as well as economically more efficient use of EV fleets. The Communication Networks Institute of TU Dortmund is responsible for the design, the implementation and validation of the Over-the-Air Interface considering the EV fleet based use case scenarios in e-Dash. Major focus is set on the optimization potential enabled by the OTA interface due to its charge session independence compared to other state of the art V2G communication interface approaches. Current research in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) as well as Vehicle-to-Infrastructure standardization (e.g. ETSI) is addressed by the contributions of e-Dash.

Anchors

National Projects

metropol-E

The electric mobility project “metropol-E” is funded by the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development (BMVBS) in the next two years. Local mobility concepts are electrified, and will be tested in conjunction with intelligent and fast charging technologies in the Ruhr area. The municipal fleet in the city of Dortmund is expanded with electric vehicles and e-bikes and is associated with a variety of innovative electric mobility applications. Examples include innovative fast charging techniques and user-friendly accounting methods for full electric vehicles in the city pool. All this is happening against the background of the intelligent integration of renewable energies. For CO2-free charging of the vehicle fleet intelligent photovoltaic systems and micro wind turbines will generate locally the required renewable electricity. The Communication Networks Institute will develop services that collect specific information about the vehicle fleet and integrate them into the booking and reservation system for vehicles. This networking will improve the mobility concept and the energy efficiency of the municipal fleet.

D2-SENSE

On construction sites, in agricultural business but also in industrial plants as well as in logistics centers many accidents still occur due to the fact that drivers of heavy machinery overlook persons because of blind spots and other visual obstructions within the immediate area. The aim of this project is the development of a novel alarming system to advise the drivers of the potential risks precociously.

TIE-IN

A future widespread use of electric vehicles requires reliable and comprehensive charging infrastructures. The communication between all systems, which are involved in order to control and monitor charging processes or to enable flexible billing of charging operations, becomes an important factor in acceptance of the intended electric mobility. It will be a highly distributed infrastructure in a multi-vendor, multinetwork and multi-service environment with spatially separated and partially mobile components, which are essential for the integration in established IT-Systems in order to enable reliable grid control. The challenge is to ensure the interoperability of such a system, consisting of different charge point operators, electrical grid components and multitude electric vehicles, through standardized data structures and reliable communication protocols. The central contribution of the Dortmund University of Technology for the "NRW Center of Excellence for Electric Mobility - Infrastructure and Networks" is the project named "Technology and Testing-platform for Interoperable E-mobility, Infrastructure and Networks" (TIE-IN). In order to evaluate new products on their interoperability, within the TIE-IN project a center of excellence consisting of a test- and development environment is build up, that can be used by grid- and charging infrastructure operators as well as by different manufacturers in the context of E-mobility.

 Falschfahrerwarnsystem

The project Falschfahrerwarnsystem (Wrong Way Driver Detection and Alerting System) deals with the design and development of an electronic detection and warning system of wrong-way drivers on highways using wireless technology. These wireless infrastructure components are used for a passive detection of the driving direction and allow the transmission of specific warning messages (local and wide area) to alert the affected traffic with low latency. Energy harvesting solutions are integrated in the development of the individual components to grant the energy self-sufficiency. Optional a mobile warning unit for use in the vehicle will be developed to allow the integration of local (short range radio) warnings to retrofit modules, navigation devices and mobile phones.

Sec2

Cloud Computing is an emerging technology that is attracting increased attention as a high-performance and low-cost solution to process arbitrarily huge data and share them among dierent users and organizations. Nonetheless, this technology rises new questions on security and privacy, especially when working with highly condential data. Existing solutions offering end-to-end security are of no help since the stored data is only encrypted during their transport. Therefore, a message-level security must at least be applied to protect those data during and after the storing process. This security project investigates a novel solution for secure and highly scalable data storage in the cloud. It allows each client to encrypt outgoing data on his device and share it among a defined user group while using a seamless service provision. The property of Sec2 solution is that users keep full control over their data and no changes on the existing infrastructure of cloud storage services are needed.

AVIGLE

The innovative project AVIGLE will expand the current state-of-the-art in security research through a multifunctional avionic digital service platform. This platform will be based on civil autonomous flying robots (Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – MUAV) while delivering near real-time 3D virtualization and groundbreaking strategies for ad-hoc radio coverage in cellular networks. These innovative services enable public institutions to improve their rescue operations in case of incidents. This platform also allows for cost-efficient access to the provided services for private companies, clearing the way towards new business models. The platform will allow the user to efficiently create digital 3D models for buildings, estates or even whole cities. In addition, AVIGLE will offer the opportunity to temporarily extend the capacity of the cellular network for security and commercial applications in case of rescue operations, major events or power failure.

E-DeMa

E-DeMa develops solutions to make electricity distribution more intelligent. In future the customer should be able to organize his electricity consumption on when the price is cheapest during the day, for example. In addition, the consumer/customer should also be able to act as a provider on the energy marketplace. If, for example, he has a small decentralised cogeneration station or a fuel cell in his cellar or a photovoltaic system on his roof, he can feed excess electricity into the grid. The customer becomes a "Prosumer", in other words a consumer and producer at the same time. The low supply amounts of individual households can be concentrated by the energy marketplace. The energy supply system in Germany will thus become more flexible and local. 

The IST-MORE project (Network-centric Middleware for GrOup communication and Resource Sharing across Heterogeneous Embedded Systems) is a research project funded by the European Union during the 6th Framework Program. The project builds upon recent approaches in embedded systems research, implementing a middleware to overcome the heterogeneity of available network technologies. MORE implements a new service environment to facilitate communication and distributed intelligence across groups of users using different wireless standards. It addresses the problem of how the interaction between groups of humans and embedded systems can be efficiently supported by developing a system that can be easily tailored to the specific needs of diverse application areas. The project targets the design of a web service based middleware that hides the complexity of the underlying heterogeneity of embedded systems through providing simplified APIs and management mechanisms for future operators utilizing the MORE middleware. (Youtube )

The project INTERMON developed and demonstrated a scalable interdomain QoS architecture with integrated topology discovery, monitoring, modelling, simulation and visual data mining components. Specialized tools have been developed allowing user interaction for managing interwork of component’s using a database, which is able to process different kind of information automatically and policy-based. At this conjunction time dependent interdomain performance and traffic information has been used, as well as application QoS and event data.

The SPIDER project (Security System for Public Institutions in Disastrous Emergency ScenaRios) is a research project dealing with civil-security. It is funded by the FMER (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) programme "Protection and Rescue of People" in the domain " Scenario-based Security Research". The Spider-federation-system will provide rescue teams at major incidents an integrated and intelligent communication system that will enable efficient emergency process management.

The project aims at developing a geographic information system, consisting of hardware, software, data and applications. Therewith position related readings of gas sensors should be determined and digitally revised, stored and reorganised, modelled, analysed and presented in an alphanumeric and a graphic way.

AirShield (Airborne Remote Sensing for Hazard Inspection by Network-Enabled Lightweight Drones) is a BMBF funded research project in the field of “Civilian Safety Research” which relates to the protection of vital and sensitive infrastructures and general population from man made threats and natural disaster. This project is part of the program called "Research for the civilian safety" in the field of "Integrated protection system for rescue and security forces". In this context, the AirShield project proposes the use of (partly) autonomous mobile drones for reconnaissance purpose and aiding in the forecasting and prevention of emergency situations. The mobile drones equipped with lightweight sensors will collect relevant data/information from the incident scene, which will be processed into tangible and actionable information. This information, represented as the visual and/or spatial landscape of the incident scene, will then be relayed to the relevant authority, which is expected to enhance their mission management capabilities and decision process.

Next to E-DeMa a second project "e-mobility" funded by the BMWi within the E-Energy initiative started at the Communication Networks Institute. The list of project partners contains RWE, SAP, Ewald & Günter, TU Berlin and from ef.ruhr TU Dortmund. The E-Mobility research project aims at developing and demonstrating an innovative and in the existing electricity grid integrable charge, control and clearing infrastructure for electric mobility. The basis for this are ICT-based system innovations for the realization of a emission-free mobility by making effective use of electric energy in accordance with the customer's requested energy mix. In addition a communication architecture based on current technologies is created, providing customers comfortable value-added services to assist the acceptance of e-mobility. More information will be available on the project's website soon.

For large organizations mobile simultaneous access to distributed public authority information systems is still a challenge, if requirements such as high performance, security, reliability and simplicity have to be met concurrently. These requirements have been addressed in the German research project Mobile Information System for Process Optimization in Fire Brigades and Public Authorities (Mobis Pro) in cooperation with one of the largest fire brigades in Dortmund, Germany with 1,300 fire fighters and 30,000 rescue operations per year. For instance, in large rescue operations all participating rescue forces need detailed up to date information about the situation at the scene of emergency (e.g. object, building and site plans, video sequences (made by drones or fire fighters)). Today fire brigades own summarized information sheets of the most important buildings and objects in their field of responsibility, that are always held on the fire-fighting vehicle. However this results in insufficient information for the rescue workers during rescue operations. The time need for receiving essential and not outdated information in the field of danger and fire defense can decide on life or death. Therefore the general goal is to accelerate the process of information provision by information hosts respectively different public authorities.

GALILEO4FireBrigades develops a mobile system for localization, health monitoring and warning based on GALILEO services to increase the fire brigade forces’ security. Based on intended GALILEO services, clients are developed and prototypically implemented for fire brigade usage. The clients consist of sensors to determine physiological parameters and environmental conditions of the action forces. Furthermore, clients are able to forward position information, sensor parameters and emergency calls as well as to receive location based alarms.

Within the scope of MobileEmerGIS a group communication system for civil protection was investigated. This was done in cooperation with the PRO DV Software AG and the Fire Department of Dortmund. The project was funded as part of the Future competition Ruhr. The CNI, in particular, has made the following contributions: Creating an approach for reliable networking of emergency information systems, design and realization of a multimedia situation map distribution in groups and design of a virtual mission diary. As middleware, the CNI-PTX group communications system for civil protection was used. As a result a Java client for mobile phones has been implemented. 

The Position Aware Secure and Efficient Mesh Routing Protocol (PASER) aims to efficiently establish accurate routes in terms of metric and legitimated mesh nodes in wireless mesh networks in presence of external attackers. For this end, it achieves the following goals: Node authentication, message freshness and integrity, and neighbor transmissions authentication. The novelty of PASER lies essentially in combining asymmetric cryptography with Merkle tree (a lightweight cryptographic primitive) and a keyed-hash function to secure the routing messages. Another key feature of PASER is integrating (virtual) geographical positions of nodes in its hierarchical reactive routing process to enable an advanced network management while mitigating the wormhole attack. Apart from that, to address the problem of node compromise, PASER endorses a key revocation scheme to efficiently exclude those nodes.

IETF has proposed MIPv6 based Network Mobility (NEMO) Basic Support protocol that handles the mobility management of IPv6 based mobile networks. However the NEMO protocol has severe performance limitations and does not specify the route optimization method for mobile networks and does not take into account the operational and functional complexities involving nested mobile networks. In this draft we present NEst Route Optimization for NEMO (NERON) protocol, a light weight, efficient and scalable approach that aims at enabling nodes behind nested mobile networks to use optimized communication paths with zero tunneling overhead and minimum end-to-end delay, irrespective of the depth of the nest, with minimum but manageable changes to the base MIPv6 and IPv6 Neighbor Discovery protocols and without introducing any new network entities.

IETF has proposed Fast Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) protocol, a seamless handover protocol, that reduces packet loss during the handover process by tunneling packets from the MN's previous IP subnet to the new IP subnet where they will get buffered. These buffered packets will get forwarded to the MN once it becomes IP capable in the new subnet. Although packet tunneling and buffering is an effective strategy to reduce packet loss during the handover process but it will not only incur a high tunneling load on the link between the previous and new subnets, especially for CBR traffic, but will also account towards increased processing load in the access routers due to successive tunneling and de-tunneling of packets. This tunneling load is also dependent on the timing of the FMIPv6 handover decision which in turn is directly dependent on the location and speed of the MN. In order to remedy the above mentioned performance limitations, a mechanism called Proactive Bindings for FMIPv6 (PB-FMIPv6) has been proposed that not only reduces the tunneling load during the handover process but it also decouples the handover decision from the location and/or speed of the MN. An Internet Draft has been submitted to the IETF with the operational and functional details of this new mechanism.

The Candidate Access Router Discovery (CARD) protocol specified in [1] is aimed to enable seamless IP layer handover by aiding seamless Layer 3 (L3) mobility management protocols like Fast Mobile IP (FMIP) by providing identity and capabilities information of the candidate access routers (CARs) to the mobile node (MN) prior to the initiation of handover while the MN is still connected to its current AR. The specifications as laid down in [1], however, specifies a very generic mechanism of the CARD protocol effective only in specific network architecture scenarios and it doesn't take into account the stringent requirements of a fast moving MN and real time communication sessions, especially when it comes to resolving candidate access routers that may be adjacent geographically but not topologically. This draft addresses the expected shortcomings of the base CARD protocol with respect to fast moving MNs and real time communication sessions by proposing extensions that is expected to improve and/or enhance the performance of the generic CARD protocol as specified in [1].

The objective of the openV2G software project is to support the ISO and IEC standardization process to specify the so called "Vehicle 2 Grid Communication Interface" (V2G CI) which will become in the future the ISO IEC 15118 specification. We believe that an open source project serves best the need for evaluating a new technology under specification. The goal of this project is to provide means to verify specified messages, their functionality and ultimately enabling a stable specification. With these objectives we hope that the project is of help for the ISO/TC 22/SC 3/JWG 1 in their specification work.

PASER stands for Position Aware Secure and Efficient Mesh Routing and describes a novel efficient secure routing protocol for wireless mesh networks. The protocol aims to achieve an acceptable tradeoff between security and performance of the routing process in wireless mesh networks. PASER has been implemented for OMNeT++ 4.1 and 4.2, respectively. Currently, it is under development on Linux.

Extensible Mobile IPv6 (xMIPv6) is a simulation model that has been implemented with strict conformance to IETF’s official specification for the Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) protocol that has been standardised in RFC 3775. It has been developed in the INET20061020 framework for OMNeT++ 3.2 and the accuracy and reliability of its performance has been validated against a real Linux based MIPv6 test bed.