18.11.2010 – On November 16, 2011, the DFG authorized a new collaborative research center (SFB) at TU Dortmund. The SFB 876 is titled "Verfügbarkeit von Information durch Analyse unter Ressourcenbeschränkung." With the SFB, the field of embedded systems and that of data analysis (data mining) are combined in order to allow for a lot of applications in informatics, biomedicine, physics, and mechanical engineering. On the one hand, embedded systems are optimized by data analysis. On the other hand, analysis algorithms can be realized as FPGAs, for example. With the focus on resource-efficient communication networks, the institute participates in two subprojects of the SFB. The SFB starts on January 1, 2011.

09.11.2010 – At this year's international IEEE symposium on technologies used in emergency services and civil protection (IEEE HST 2010) in Waltham, Boston, the CNI contribution "Leveraging Public Wireless Communication Infrastructures for UAV-Based Sensor Networks" was honored with a Best Paper Award. The paper presents an innovative system concept for the use of cellular radio networks for the operation of sensor swarms for the measurement of pollutant clouds.

01.11.2010 – The Communication Networks Institute of TU Dortmund jointly organized with the Aerospace Controls Laboratory of the MIT the first workshop on "Wireless Networking for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles" at the IEEE Globecom 2010. The availability of low-cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), such as unmanned quadrocopters and blimps, opens up the prospects of an entirely new class of Low Altitude Wireless Network Platforms, which are hosted at altitudes of up to a few hundred meters.
The workshop aimed to share and discuss most recent results of various international research initiatives in the area of communication systems for aerial wireless networks. The focus of the workshop has been solely based on projects and research aiming at civilian applications.

01.11.2010 – The 4th International Workshop on OMNeT++ (OMNeT++ 2011) is a one day workshop to be held in conjunction with the Fourth International Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques (SIMUTools 2011). The workshop will take place in Barcelona, Spain.
The goal of this workshop is to bring together OMNeT++ users and their tools, applications and ideas. It intends to provide a forum for presentations of recent developments and novel ideas in the broad context of network simulation with focus on OMNeT++. It will bring together researchers to focus on the important topics of integrating simulation models, coupling different simulation tools, providing better modeling approaches, and contributing to the active modeling and simulation community with respect to identifying some of the most promising candidate solution methods, architectures and techniques to address the various challenges of network simulation.

30.10.2010 – The Communication Networks Institute of TU Dortmund delivered a tutorial on "Aerial Sensor Networks" at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security (Waltham/Boston). Recent advances in the area of unmanned aerial vehicles allow the ad-hoc, airborne deployment of various sensor types to gain up-to-date 3D-environmental data. From the sensor data gained from the atmosphere, extremely valuable information can derived to prevent and limit the impact of various disaster scenarios. The content of the tutorial included the technology components as well as the opportunities and boundaries related to the deployment of aerial sensor networks. Over 20 attendees visited the tutorial which was presented by Professor Christian Wietfeld.

31.08.2010 – At the Third International Conference on Advances in Mesh Networks (MESH 2010) in Venice in July, Andreas Lewandowski, Volker Köster and Christian Wietfeld presented a comparison between the two ad-hoc routing protocols "Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector" (AODV) and "Optimized Link State Routing" (OLSR) for the use on highly resource-constrained sensor nodes based on the IEEE802.15.4 standard. Title of the paper: "Performance Evaluation of AODV- and OLSR-meshed IP-enabled IEEE802.15.4."

30.08.2010 – The Communication Networks Institute helped to organize this year's VDE ITG Symposium "Zukunft der Netze 2010". This time, the conference, which is organized by the expert committee on a regular basis, had the main topic "Self-Organizing Networks" and took place in Stuttgart on October 6 and 7, 2010.

01.07.2010 – In 2010 the Communication Networks Institute participates in international student exchange programs again: The Research Internships in Science and Engineering (RISE) and the International Association for the Exchange of Students for Technical Experience (IAESTE), both funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Currently, seven students from the US, the UK, Tunisia, India, and Spain got the internship and attended the department during the course of summer 2010. Current attendees are: Madhukar Reddy (IN), Arpit Agrawal (IN), Mohamed Maalaoui (TN), Laura Martinez Borlaff (ES), Otilia Frangu (UK), Jonathan Jackson (US), and Nassir Abou Ziki (US) (from left to right).

01.07.2010 – At the First IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, the CNI is represented by the following two papers:

Wietfeld, C., Müller, C., Schmutzler, J., Fries, S., Heidenreich, A. and Hof, H.-J., "ICT Reference Architecture Design based on Requirements for Future Energy Marketplaces ", accepted for presentation on IEEE SmartGridComm 2010, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, IEEE, Oct 2010.

Lichtensteiger, B., Bjelajac, B., Müller, C. and Wietfeld, C., "RF Mesh Systems for Smart Metering: System Architecture and Performance ", accepted for presentation on IEEE SmartGridComm 2010, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, IEEE, Oct 2010.