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. 

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 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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.