Distributed Systems Engineering Lab (diselab)

We are a group of researchers from Technische Universität Berlin (TUB), Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI), and University of Glasgow (UofG), who collaborate on topics at the intersection of distributed systems, operating systems, and software engineering. Currently, we are looking predominantly at the dependability and efficiency of critical applications in the heterogeneous and dynamic distributed computing environments of the Internet of Things (IoT).

We investigate new methods, systems, and practices that make it easier to develop efficient and dependable distributed systems on large and diverse computing infrastructures. For this, we mainly focus on empirical systems research, yet also work on practical applications to identify opportunities for well motivated and impactful research.

news

• December 2022: We are organizing a special issue of Software: Practice and Experience, with a focus similar to our workshop: "Benchmarking, Experimentation Tools, and Reproducible Practices for Data-Intensive Systems from Edge to Cloud". Please consider submitting a paper until end of February next year.
• September 2022: Our International Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS) took place once more with IC2E and was a success again, thanks to everyone involved! We were able to accept six papers for presentation at the workshop with the help of our Program Committee, invited a keynote from industry and another one from academia, and enjoyed lively discussions with around 25 participants in Pacific Grove, California.
• August 2022: Our invited survey on emulators for edge/fog/cloud computing environments and testing of distributed IoT Systems was finally published in the post-proceedings of ICSOC'21.
• June 2022: Lauritz Thamsen is recruiting for the next cohort of School of Computing Science PhDs at the University of Glasgow. Applications are due July 31.
• May 2022: We opened the call for the 2nd iteration of our International Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS) co-located with the 10th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering. Submit your contribution until June 21, 2022!
• March 2022: Lauritz Thamsen started as a Lecturer in the Glasgow Systems Section (GLASS), extending this collaboration to the University of Glasgow.
• December 2021: We surveyed the state of the art on emulating IoT environments to be able to experiment with and test edge/fog computing systems in an invited paper for ICSOC 2021.
• November 2021: We will give a tutorial on Marvis, our approach to continuously testing IoT systems, at the 19th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2021) later this month. [video recording]
• October 2021: The 1st Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS) has been held (online). We were impressed by the invited talks, paper presentations, and lively discussions.
• September 2021: The program of our 1st Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS) is now finalized: We are looking forward to a total of six paper presentations as well as to two invited talks on the first day of IEEE IC2E 2021, October 4, from 8 am PDT / 5 pm CEST. Take a look on the website, under Workshop Program.
• August 2021: Same as last year, we are helping to organize the ide3a winter school program of the upcoming winter term. Registrations are open until September 28!
• April 2021: Our short paper on Marvis won the "Best WiP Paper" award at PerCom 2021!
• March 2021: We are helping to set up a new lecture series in the ide3a network. The lectures on "Critical Infrastructures and Digitalization" will discuss urban infrastructures such as transport systems, energy grids, water networks, and information technology. It will run this summer semester for the first time, with registrations due already on March 26!
• February 2021: We are organizing the 1st International Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS) at IEEE IC2E 2021. The workshop scope includes simulations, models, hybrid testbeds, test frameworks, failure injection, monitoring tools, and IoT applications. If your work is related, consider submitting a paper!
• October 2020: We are currently looking for motivated students who want to work with us in their master theses. Get in touch, if you are generally interested in hybrid co-simulation testbeds for IoT applications or, more specifically, auto-calibration of emulated IoT resources!
• August 2020: We are helping to organize the winter school series of ide3a in the upcoming winter term. The first course will take place at TU Berlin from October 5 to 9. The application deadline is September 10.
• June 2020: To further facilitate the ongoing collaboration between the Distributed and Operating Systems group at TU Berlin and the Operating Systems and Middleware group at HPI, we founded the diselab. In the lab, we jointly look at how efficient and dependable distributed IoT systems for critical infrastructures can be developed, tested, and operated.

publications

• FedZero: Leveraging Renewable Excess Energy in Federated Learning. Philipp Wiesner, Ramin Khalili, Dennis Grinwald, Pratik Agrawal, Lauritz Thamsen, and Odej Kao. In the Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems (e-Energy). 2024. [pdf]
• Carbon-Awareness in CI/CD. Henrik Claßen, Jonas Thierfeldt, Julian Tochman-Szewc, Philipp Wiesner, and Odej Kao. In the Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Sustainable Service-Oriented Computing (SSCOPE) at ICSOC ‘23. 2023. [pdf]
• Offloading Real-Time Tasks in IIoT Environments under Consideration of Networking Uncertainties. Ilja Behnke, Philipp Wiesner, Paul Voelker, and Odej Kao. In the Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Middleware for the Edge (MiddleWEdge) at Middleware ‘23. 2023. [pdf]
• Software-in-the-Loop Simulation for Developing and Testing Carbon-Aware Applications. Philipp Wiesner, Marvin Steinke, Henrik Nickel, Yazan Kitana, and Odej Kao. Software: Practice and Experience, 53 (12). 2023. [pdf]
• Towards Benchmarking Power-Performance Characteristics of Federated Learning Clients. Pratik Agrawal, Philipp Wiesner, and Odej Kao. In the Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Machine Learning & Networking (MaLeNe) at NetSys ‘23. 2023. [pdf]
• Towards a Real-Time IoT: Approaches for Incoming Packet Processing in Cyber-Physical Systems. Ilja Behnke, Christoph Blumschein, Robert Danicki, Philipp Wiesner, Lauritz Thamsen, and Odej Kao. Journal of Systems Architecture (JSA). 2023. [pdf]
• Towards Energy Consumption and Carbon Footprint Testing for AI-driven IoT Services. Demetris Trihinas, Lauritz Thamsen, Jossekin Beilharz, and Moysis Symeonides. In the Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E). Presented at the Second International Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS). IEEE. 2022. [pdf]
• IoTreeplay: Synchronous Distributed Traffic Replay in IoT Environments. Markus Toll, Ilja Behnke, and Odej Kao. In the Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E). Presented at the Second International Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS). IEEE. 2022. [code]
• Integration of C-V2X Into a Hybrid Testbed to Co-Simulate ITS Applications and Scenarios. Paul Geppert and Jossekin Beilharz. In the Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E). Presented at the Second International Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS). IEEE. 2022. [code]
• Cucumber: Renewable-Aware Admission Control for Delay-Tolerant Cloud and Edge Workloads. Philipp Wiesner, Dominik Scheinert, Thorsten Wittkopp, Lauritz Thamsen, and Odej Kao. In the Proceedings of the 28th International European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par). Springer. 2022. [pdf]
• Differentiating Network Flows for Priority-Aware Scheduling of Incoming Packets in Real-Time IoT Systems. Christoph Blumschein, Ilja Behnke, Lauritz Thamsen, and Odej Kao. In the Proceedings of the IEEE 25th International Symposium on Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC). IEEE. 2022. [pdf]
• The Methods of Cloud Computing. Lauritz Thamsen, Jossekin Beilharz, Andreas Polze, and Odej Kao. Technical Report. Technische Universität Berlin. 2022. [pdf]
• A Priority-Aware Multiqueue NIC Design for Real-Time IoT Devices. Ilja Behnke, Philipp Wiesner, Robert Danicki, and Lauritz Thamsen. In the Proceedings of the 37th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC). Presented as a poster in the Embedded Systems Track (EMBS). ACM. 2022. [pdf]
• Continuously Testing Distributed IoT Systems: An Overview of the State of the Art. Jossekin Beilharz, Philipp Wiesner, Arne Boockmeyer, Dirk Friedenberger, Florian Brokhausen, Lukas Pirl, Ilja Behnke, Andreas Polze, and Lauritz Thamsen. In the Post-Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC). Springer. 2021. [pdf]
• Dependable IoT Data Stream Processing for Monitoring and Control of Urban Infrastructures. Morgan Geldenhuys, Jonathan Will, Benjamin Pfister, Martin Haug, Alex Scharmann, and Lauritz Thamsen. In the Proceedings of the 9th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E). Presented at the First International Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS). IEEE. 2021. [pdf] [code]
• NetSD: Remote Access to Integrated SD Cards of Embedded Devices. Valentin Schröter, Arne Boockmeyer and Lukas Pirl. In the Proceedings of the 9th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E). Presented at the First International Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS). IEEE. 2021. [pdf] [code]
• From CCS-Planning to Testautomation: The Digital Testfield of Deutsche Bahn in Scheibenberg - A Case Study. Arne Boockmeyer, Dirk Friedenberger, Lukas Pirl, Robert Schmid, Andreas Polze, Heiko Herholz, Gisela Freiin von Arnim, Pedro Lehmann Ibáñez, Torsten Friedrich, Christoph Klaus, and Christian Wilhelmi. In the Proceedings of the 9th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E). Presented at the First International Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS). IEEE. 2021. [pdf]
• Observing a Moving Target - Reliable Transmission of Debug Logs from Embedded Mobile Devices. Björn Daase, Leon Matthes, Lukas Pirl, and Lukas Wenzel. In the Proceedings of the 9th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E). Presented at the First International Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS). IEEE. 2021. [pdf] [code]
• GRAL: Localization of Floating Wireless Sensors in Pipe Networks. Martin Haug, Felix Lorenz, and Lauritz Thamsen. In the Proceedings of the 9th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E). Presented at the First International Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS). IEEE. 2021. [pdf] [code]
• Detecting and Mitigating Network Packet Overloads on Real-Time Devices in IoT Systems. Robert Danicki, Martin Haug, Ilja Behnke, Laurenz Mädje, and Lauritz Thamsen. In the Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Edge Systems, Analytics and Networking (EdgeSys), co-located with the 16th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys). ACM. 2021. [pdf]
• LEAF: Simulating Large Energy-Aware Fog Computing Environments. Philipp Wiesner and Lauritz Thamsen. In the Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE 5th International Conference on Fog and Edge Computing (ICFEC). IEEE. 2021. [pdf] [code] [video]
• PIERES: A Playground for Network Interrupt Experiments on Real-Time Embedded Systems in the IoT. Franz Bender, Jan Jonas Brune, Nick Lauritz Keutel, Ilja Behnke and Lauritz Thamsen. In the Companion of the 2021 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE Companion). Presented at the 9th International Workshop on Load Testing and Benchmarking of Software Systems (LTB). IEEE. 2021. [pdf]
• Towards a Staging Environment for the Internet of Things. Jossekin Beilharz, Philipp Wiesner, Arne Boockmeyer, Florian Brokhausen, Ilja Behnke, Robert Schmid, Lukas Pirl, and Lauritz Thamsen. In the Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PerCom Workshops). Presented in the Work in Progress (WiP) session of the conference. IEEE. 2021. [pdf] [code]
• Interrupting Real-Time IoT Tasks: How Bad Can It Be to Connect Your Critical Embedded System to the Internet?. Ilja Behnke, Lukas Pirl, Lauritz Thamsen, Robert Danicki, Andreas Polze, and Odej Kao. In the Proceedings of the 39th IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference (IPCCC). IEEE. 2020. [pdf] [video]
• Hatebefi: Hybrid Applications Testbed for Fault Injection. Arne Boockmeyer, Jossekin Beilharz, Lukas Pirl, and Andreas Polze. In the Proceedings of the 22nd International Symposium on Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC). IEEE. 2019. [pdf]
• Héctor: A Framework for Testing IoT Applications Across Heterogeneous Edge and Cloud Testbeds. Ilja Behnke, Lauritz Thamsen, and Odej Kao. In the Proceedings of the 12th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC). Presented at the 8th International Workshop on Cloud and Edge Computing and Applications Management (CloudAM). ACM. 2019. [pdf] [code]