Chair

Middleware, Operating Systems, and Computer Networks

Real-time analytics on Big Data

The unlimited increase in data volume and the need to interpret this data in real-time to detect complex situations have motivated research communities to develop technologies that process high-volume data on-the-fly. Complex Event Processing (CEP) is an effective method to process such event streams to detect complex patterns being of interest to applications. This project aims at development of a CEP framework that incorporates methods for the cost-efficient configuration and dynamic adaptation of CEP systems to meet latency requirements of applications. Moreover, in the presence of resource limitation, the focus is on approximation or load shedding methods for operators and their impact on the latency and quality of CEP processing. The overall goal is to develop load shedding methods that ensure a given latency bound for an operator graph, while maximizing the quality of result perceived by the application.

Distributed Digital Twin Systems

Digital twins are revolutionizing industries by enabling real-time simulation, monitoring, and optimization of physical systems through their virtual counterparts. Extending this to distributed digital twin systems (DDTS) amplifies the potential, making applications pervasive across smart cities, smart grids, manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare. A DDTS facilitates interoperability between different vendors, manufacturers, and domains, fostering an integrated ecosystem where independently developed systems can interact and avoid vendor lock-in. To realize this vision, we are developing a middleware focused on low latency and scalability in DDTS environments. The middleware provides a modular, flexible infrastructure that supports plug-and-play operability, so devices and services can dynamically discover and communicate with each other.

Reconfigurable Networks

The project aims at exploiting the recent advances in software-defined networking (SDN) technologies to enable highly efficient communication middleware systems (e.g., publish/subscribe systems) and networked applications (e.g., networked control systems as used in automation). To this end, the project addresses challenges associated with both the data plane and the control plane. Concepts are developed to push the functionality - that was previously implemented on the application layer of the OSI model - to the hardware switches (in the data plane) to substantially improve the performance of middleware/application in terms of latency and throughput.