With increasing demand for flexible aerial systems, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become central to research in areas like emergency response, mobile networking, and surveillance. Multirotor UAVs enable seamless movement in all directions, but introduce challenges in localization, mapping, and real-time path planning. Modern missions require more than basic collision avoidance or shortest-path computation; they demand energy-efficient, safe, and adaptive navigation. In networking applications, additional constraints include restricted airspaces, frequency zoning, radio silence mandates, and uplink visibility. Although UAV path planning has been studied extensively, many existing methods are computationally intensive. To address this, we propose F-Star (F*), a framework that integrates adaptive spatial partitioning, weighted graph search, and trajectory smoothing for efficient and safe UAV navigation, while providing extensibility for multi-objective planning. A preliminary study in realistic scenarios demonstrates our proposed solutions effectiveness in dynamic obstacle avoidance with low computational cost and extensibility for multi-objective planning domains.

5G (and beyond) cellular networks have gained much attraction in the past for various application domains in context of industry automation, autonomous and cooperative mobility, as well as smart cities. A main commonality of those use cases is their strong reliance on specific Quality-of-Service (QoS) metrics, which are crucial for seamless operation of those applications. This especially holds true for 5 G use cases in the aviation domain, where a prominent application is the Virtual Table Inspection (VTI) - a process in which aircraft maintenance, disassembly, and reassembly are continuously monitored in real time via high-quality video and audio streams, enabling end-to-end tracking of quality control for all aircraft components. Providing concurrent high-quality video streams requiring high data rates and low latencies together with guaranteed packet delivery ratios is a main challenge of 5 G networks - that particularly holds for 5 G campus networks which are often difficult to scale. Our project DeSiRe-NG tackles exactly these shortcomings by providing a versatile architecture to detect under-performance of 5G networks. Further, our proposed architecture allows to generate the Digital Twin (DT) of a 5G network’s QoS, which helps to improve the research and development process of novel networking architectures and applications, as well as aid the continuous supervision of a network. In a first proof of concept study, we present the functionality of our system in an industrial environment.

The fifth generation (5G) is the current state-of-the-art mobile communication system that has features for ensuring reliability and throughput being key ingredients for many application domains. A major distinction of applications using cellular networks is that they employ different requirements regarding the QoS, e.g., latency and data rates for communication. When adapting network protocol to the underlying communication system for increasing the reliability of applications, reproducible tests and measurements of network characteristics are of utmost importance to streamline a systematic development process of those applications. In this paper, we present a framework called Decentralized Measurement and Emulation of Networks (DecMEN) which is a versatile, decentralized and scalable tool for reproducible measurement and emulation of network characteristics of 5G and beyond networks. Along presenting a novel architecture for scalable measurements and network emulation, we perform a feasibility study on a private 5G campus network to showcase our developed framework in a real world setting. To assess the performance, we empirically evaluate the results of measurements of our 5G network and the emulation of network characteristics to observe differences of important networking metrics consisting of communication latency, and data rate. Our study reveals promising results, where the evaluation shows a good match of network characteristics between the real 5G network under test and the emulated 5G network.

In vehicular networks, information about the surroundings is of crucial importance. There are various applications that rely on information about a vehicle’s neighboring vehicles, such as autonomous and teleoperated driving, platooning and message forwarding being some of them. While maintaining an overview of vehicles in direct communication range via beaconing is a well-explored concept, recent works have shown that collecting the neighbor information of direct neighbors, which are the neighbor’s neighbors, is beneficial for certain applications. This data can be aggregated to the so-called two-hop neighbor set. Creating an accurate two-hop neighbor set is, however, a difficult task, as information is quickly outdated due to the mobility of vehicles and delays of data transmission. While previous work has used mainly ad-hoc communication, this work introduces a central vision utilizing 5G cellular communication to improve the freshness of neighbor data. We conduct a first simulation study to compare the performance of our centralized approach to a purely ad-hoc approach and present the results in this poster paper. We conclude with an outlook to future research directions. In future work, a deeper investigation of potential optimizations and challenges will be conducted.

We propose SAMAC, a Device-to-Device (D2D) communication scheme that can exploit Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites as temporarily-available infrastructure with intermediate round-trip-times for supporting D2D medium access of highly mobile ground nodes such as vehicles. We demonstrate how such a scheme can be kept backwards-compatible to, e.g., IEEE 802.11p and we demonstrate analytically and in computer simulations that, compared to unassisted D2D communication or relaying, in situations where a LEO satellite is available it can improve performance in terms of all of throughput, latency bounds, and reliability.

Internet and mobile communication are the foundation of today’s worldwide interaction and connectivity. Recently, several approaches have been introduced in order to add resilience to communication networks mainly by using low cost and commodity hardware by e.g., facilitating smart phones interconnected via LoRa communication. We extend those ideas by introducing a novel and versatile networking architecture for emergency communication in the context of crisis situations (e.g., when cellular coverage is gone) for mobile devices to keep communication overhead low by following an ad hoc and distributed multi-hop networking approach. In this work, we present a demo of our network to handle emergency communication. It features the long-range, wide area communication technique (LoRa), a web-based chat client with a user-friendly interface, a novel data processing approach, as well as a routing algorithm to ensure fast and efficient communication.

Due to their unique mobility, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites can provide network services in areas with little to no existing infrastructure and due to their low orbit they enable communication at low latencies. We thus motivate the use of LEO satellites for supporting multi-hop Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication as an alternative to dense base station deployment and present CLEO, an approach that can opportunistically use LEO satellites for information dissemination among vehicles. Using extensive computer simulations, we show that not only are relaying latencies low enough for such an approach to be feasible, but we can actually improve performance of information dissemination in terms of all of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Channel Busy Ratio (CBR), and end-to-end latency.

Platooning is a promising application in the field of vehicular networks. It has the potential to improve traffic flow, but also road safety. However, unreliable communication has strong negative effects on platoon stability and, thus, safety on roads. To improve reliability, in this work, we propose using multi-hop communication for platooning using the Decode and Forward (DF) Full-Duplex Relaying (FDR) scheme together with beamforming. We use computer simulations to demonstrate that FDR latency has no observable negative effect on string stability or safety even while performing an emergency brake. We further show that this combined approach reaches a constant Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) of 100 % even in situations with high interference and/or congestion, where traditional approaches fail.

Sensor data sharing has an immense potential to enhance the perception capabilities of vehicles and to provide better situational awareness. It is being standardized as collective perception by the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) as part of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS). For the transmission of collective perception messages via sidelink in Cellular-V2X, sensing-based semi-persistent scheduling (SB-SPS) in the unmanaged mode of 5G-NR V2X provides low-latency communication among road traffic participants that are located outside the cellular network coverage. The unpredictability of the collective perception messages in periodicity and size poses certain challenges on the SB-SPS, thereby creating poor utilization of radio resources and high risk of resource collisions. Existing system level simulations study the performance of collective perception from the application perspective without addressing the radio resource allocation at the access layer. This work investigates the challenges of the sidelink resource allocation mechanisms in 5G-NR V2X and assesses the impact of the mechanism on the performance of collective perception by simulation in a realistic urban traffic environment. A practical approach is adopted to formulate mathematical models that can characterize the radio resource utilization and resource collisions arising in such environments and yield the appropriate 5G-NR V2X parameters.

Road traffic is continuously increasing worldwide and Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs)such as bicyclists are ever more susceptible to injuries from crashes. Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET)technologies in combination with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS)are currently being evaluated to enhance road traffic safety. The same technology is now also considered for warning cyclists about imminent crashes. Prototypes for such VANET -enabled bicycles already exist, however, the primary problem here is verification and test due to immediate safety concerns for the participants. Computer simulation is considered a more feasible alternative; however, realistic behavior models of VRUs are not available in the required quality and quantity. We developed a virtual cycling environment to address this issue, allowing to study and record cyclists' behavior. We collected (and make available)traces from a variety of subjects cycling towards an intersection for three different safety critical scenarios. As proof of concept, we then used these traces in our vehicular networking simulation framework to assess the impact of a simple VANET solution on the cyclists' safety. Our results demonstrate the need for such an integrated framework for empirical studies as well as for simulation-based exploration of system configurations.

The trend toward autonomous driving and the recent advances in vehicular networking led to a number of very successful proposals in cooperative driving. Maneuvers can be coordinated among participating vehicles and controlled by means of wireless communications. One of the most challenging scenarios or applications in this context is cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) or platooning. When it comes to realizing safety gaps between the cars of less than 5 m, very strong requirements on the communication system need to be satisfied. The underlying distributed control system needs regular updates of sensor information from the other cars in the order of about 10 Hz. This leads to message rates in the order of up to 10 kHz for large networks, which, given the possibly unreliable wireless communication and the critical network congestion, is beyond the capabilities of current vehicular networking concepts. In this paper, we summarize the concepts of networked control systems and revisit the capabilities of current vehicular networking approaches. We then present opportunities of Tactile Internet concepts that integrate interdisciplinary approaches from control theory, mechanical engineering, and communication protocol design. This way, it becomes possible to solve the high reliability and latency issues in this context.

Recent works have shown that it would be beneficial for nodes in wireless networks with very dynamic topology to maintain a list of 2-hop neighbors, namely, the neighbors of its neighbors. This is important, for example, for routing, clustering, and message dissemination to all the nodes in a given geographic vicinity. In this paper, we propose a scheme that uses Bloom filters for maintaining 2-hop neighborship information. Furthermore, we developed a novel 2-hop broadcast algorithm making use of the specific nature of our Bloom filter encoded neighbor information. We particularly focus on the Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) application scenario. Here, beaconing is a periodic broadcast of awareness messages by each vehicle to its immediate neighbors. A na€ıve approach would be to include all 2-hop neighbors in each beacon message, which, however, would work only for small or sparse scenarios. We show that our approach significantly reduces the length of the beacon messages, thereby keeping channel load and collision probability considerably lower than in the na€ıve scheme. We further demonstrate the application of our Bloom filter based 2-hop neighbor table for developing higher layer protocols and introduce a multi-hop broadcast protocol called Bloom Hopping.

A major building block of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is broadcasting: the use of wireless communication for sharing information among vehicles, or between the vehicles and infrastructure. Dozens of broadcast protocols have been developed in recent years, including protocols for 1-hop broadcasting of vehicle status information (beaconing) and for geocasting-based applications. However, most of these protocols were designed for one application and cannot co-exist, nor can one broadcast solution meet the demands of all applications. These observations motivated our effort to develop a holistic network layer for VANETs. We identify the need for making VANET broadcast context-aware, and for supporting four different classes of broadcast protocols, each with its own properties. These classes are not only able to co-exist on the same network layer, but also to complement one another's functionality. Thus, large applications as well as more holistic Transport protocols can be designed by combining two or more broadcast classes. We discuss the specific characteristics of these classes and design candidate protocols for each class.

We present LAN Radio, an Open Source prototyping system to couple simulation and real world for the wireless channel of IEEE 802.11p based communication. Our main focus is the use in a vehicular networking environment, where field testing and real world experimentation is becoming more relevant these days. Large Field Operational Tests (FOTs) are expensive and difficult to handle in terms of reproducibility and controllability -- particularly for application development and integration tests for automotive Electronic Control Units (ECUs). To support such experiments, we developed an approach to integrate a real system to test into a large scale simulation scenario without the need to change the physical and access layer parts of the communication stack of this system. We closely followed the Hardware In The Loop (HIL) simulation concept but also integrated a wireless communication channel into the picture. LAN Radio is building upon the well established and Open Source development platform OpenWRT to provide optimal extensibility.

We present OpenC2X, an Open Source approach to field testing of vehicular networking solutions. Field Operational Test (FOT) and real-world experimentation are becoming more relevant to our research community as well as to industry and regulation. Unfortunately, available commercial solutions make experimental modifications to the protocol stack time consuming or prohibit it completely. To overcome this limitation, we implemented the ETSI ITS-G5 stack on a standard embedded PC hardware and running Linux system. OpenC2X is the first complete Open Source experimentation and prototyping platform. Our system is fully interoperable to commercial solutions, yet easily extensible with new protocols and applications for vehicular networks.

Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) based localization techniques are becoming more attractive as they provide improved localization accuracy and robustness compared to WiFi or ZigBee based approaches. However, a remaining problem is the necessary update frequency: In existing CSS based localization systems, the positions of the objects are determined one by one via unicast with nearby anchors instead of using broadcasts. We propose a faster distributed localization scheme for CSS based systems. A portion of nodes are considered cluster heads; they determine the locations of un-localized nodes by dynamically increasing the transmission power. Our novel scheme not only fully utilizes the spatial redundancy, which is crucial for speeding up the localization process. By also allowing to establish new anchors in a two-hop range, we can further increase speed without significantly influencing localization error. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated through simulation.