KiMeKo (KI-Med-Kollaborationsplattform) is a publically funded collaborative research project that develops a sustainable AI-Med ecosystem for AI-based medical device development. The project runs from July 2024 to December 2027 and joins seven Northern German research institutions. KiMeKo addresses the complete development trajectory, from concept and data acquisition to validation, regulatory evidence generation, and approval-oriented documentation. The project contributes a practical toolchain and platform capabilities for non-experts and experts, including structured innovation support, uncertaintyaware sensor-data fusion, hybrid expert-system modeling, and workflow-guided data acquisition and anonymization. This paper summarizes project objectives, expected outputs, relevance to IEEE COMPSAC 2026 themes, and current progress. In particular, KiMeKo aligns with Applied AI and Smart & Connected Health by combining AI engineering, privacy-conscious data processing, and regulation-aware medical software development.

Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is redefining our lives, allowing us to make “smart” decisions. This boom has also gained popularity in academic research, one of the core goals being to make IoT research more accessible to students and early researchers, while making sure that experienced researchers keep up with the changes happening in the research area. A large number of review papers are available covering surveys related to IoT vision enabling technologies, applications, key features, and future directions. Nevertheless, there is a lack of analysis of these reviews. This study provides a scientometric analysis of already available reviews in the field of IoT to identify upcoming research needs and bring simplicity to literature research. In total, 964 review articles in the field of IoT written in English and published in peer-reviewed journals and conferences from 2010 to April 2023 have been finalized from the Google Scholar database. Three broad categories of analysis have been performed on the 964 relevant collected literature, namely (a) statistical; (b) machine learning-based; and (c) evaluative analysis. An important differentiating feature of the current study is the use of machine learning for data exploration, thereby providing better interpretation. We find that the trend to review the field of IoT has increased in the last five years with only one article in 2010. This article identifies and quantifies the knowledge gaps to inform the community, industry, and government authorities about research directions for IoT. Furthermore, this scientometric analysis serves as a foundational resource for IoT researchers in identifying relevant and important survey papers that target their research fields in IoT.

The Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT) is an innovative field of research located at the intersection of nanotechnology, biotechnology and information and communication technologies. It aims to enable the seamless integration of biological and nanoscale systems into the Internet in order to develop advanced biomedical applications, environmental monitoring sensors and energy-efficient networks. At the core of IoBNT are biocompatible nanodevices that can function in living organisms to monitor or modify specific biological processes in real time. These devices communicate with each other and with the Internet to collect, process and transmit data, opening up entirely new possibilities for health monitoring, disease control, environmental protection and many other areas. By merging biology and nanotechnology, IoBNT promises to push the boundaries of what is technically possible while improving the efficiency and sustainability of technological solutions.

In the context of the IoT, energy is a scarce resource. Since the transmission of data is one of the largest energy consumers, the amount of data must be reduced as much as possible. Modern database systems optimize the queries to reduce execution times. Therefore they also consider reducing the network traffic but neglect the network topology. Network topology is critical because it can consume more energy to send a few pieces of data over a long distance than to transmit a large amount of data to a neighboring device. Therefore, we propose new techniques for cooperation between routing and application layers.

In low-power networks, sending data over the network is one of the largest energy consumers. Therefore, any application running in such an environment must reduce the volume of communication caused by their presence. All the state of the art network simulators focus on specific parts of the network stack. Due to this specialization, the application interface is simplified in a way, that often only fictive and abstract applications can be simulated. However, we want to gain insights about the interoperability between routing and real application for the purpose of reducing communication costs. For this purpose, we propose our new simulator SIMORA in this contribution. In order to demonstrate the possibilities of SIMORA, we deploy a simple distributed application. Then, we develop advanced techniques like the dynamic content multicast to reduce the number of messages and the volume of data sent. In our experiments, we achieve reductions of up to 94% in number of messages and 29% in bytes transferred over the network compared to the traditional multicast approach.

Traditional routing approaches in VANETs use vehicular to vehicular (V2V) communication. Currently the state of the art shows that using only V2V communication has limitations to face the high mobility and intermittent connections in VANETs. Furthermore, those approaches can be used only in relatively small areas. In this sense, using mobile or fixed nodes to assist the routing process has the potential not only to improve the routing performance, instead to increase the network scalability and access to the cloud and internet. On the other hand, position-based routing has shown to be the most suitable strategy to face the high mobility. This paper, presents a new research direction on 3D-routing for VANETs, in particular, it is focused on position-based routing assisted by mobile or fixed nodes such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Road Side Units (RSUs), Mobile Gateways (MGs) or Base Stations (BSs), which perform specific functions to improve the routing performance.

This paper presents monitoring as a service for networked medical cyber-physical systems in the operating room based on the recent IEEE 11073 standards for interoperable medical device communication. Runtime Verification techniques are used to allow for a formal specification and verification. Based on the specification so called monitors are automatically synthesized. At runtime, the monitors observe the communication of the interconnected systems and examine whether they adhere to the specification. This facilitates the handling of the high safety requirements of medical cyber-physical systems and to increase their reliability. In addition, we outline the development and deployment process of the monitors and depict how the framework can be extended to react when misbehavior is detected. As a case study the interconnection of an ultrasound dissector and a microscope is used. Our benchmarks show that the monitoring overhead is substantially lower than what is required for our practical application.

In recent years, Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) have become a very active research field. Since real-world experiments might involve potentially costly and complex hardware installations, simulations are a widely used alternative. However, due to, e.g., different scopes of functionality of available VANET simulators, simulations of VANET applications yield different results when using different simulators. Thus, it would be beneficial to test a VANET application in multiple simulation environments. Unfortunately, VANET applications are typically implemented inside of a certain simulator. Hence, to switch the simulator, the source code of the application has to be adapted. To solve this problem, we developed a VANET API which defines the structure and interfaces of crucial VANET components to make them accessible in a unified way. We further developed VANET Simulation Runtime (VaSili), a framework which allows executing VANET API-compliant VANET applications in different VANET simulators without modification. Hence, applications developed using our proposed API can be run in different simulation environments and, since the VANET API is independent of VaSili, on real hardware.

Many underwater monitoring tasks, such as submarine life studies and pipeline inspections, are usually performed manually. Automated underwater monitoring has the potential to increase safety, improve timeliness, and decrease costs. We propose a hybrid solution of stationary sensor buoys and swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) and report on our current progress of its realization. Our solution is based on sensor network technology and a small mobile underwater robot developed in our institute.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are envisioned to become an integral part of the Future Internet. Together with countless other embedded appliances, such resource-constraint devices will form an Internet of Things (IoT) where all kinds of devices extend the Internet to the physical world. In this vision, the seamless and flexible integration of IoT devices ranging from simple sensor nodes to large scale Enterprise IT servers are the basis for novel applications and business processes not possible before. A major challenge is to master the arising challenges of scale, low resources, and heterogeneity. In the Internet and especially in Enterprise IT, heterogeneity is addressed using Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). However, today's technologies used to realize SOAs are to heavyweight to be used in resource-constraint networks (RCNs). In this paper, we introduce a novel, versatile, and light-weight Web Service transport protocol (called Lean Transport Protocol, LTP) that allows the transparent exchange of Web Service messages between all kinds of resource-constrained devices and server or PC class systems. We describe LTP in detail and show by real-world measurements that LTP has the potential to serve as standard Web Service transport protocol in the Internet of Things.

In recent years, tremendous progress has been made in understanding the dynamics of vehicle traffic flow and traffic congestion by interpreting traffic as a multiparticle system. This helps to explain the onset and persistence of many undesired phenomena, for example, traffic jams. It also reflects the apparent helplessness of drivers in traffic, who feel like passive particles that are pushed around by exterior forces; one of the crucial aspects is the inability to communicate and coordinate with other traffic participants. We present distributed methods for solving these fundamental problems, employing modern wireless, ad-hoc, multi-hop networks. The underlying idea is to use these capabilities as the basis for self-organizing methods for coordinating data collection and processing, recognizing traffic phenomena, and changing their structure by coordinated behavior. The overall objective is a multi-level approach that reaches from protocols for local wireless communication, data dissemination, pattern recognition, over hierarchical structuring and coordinated behavior, all the way to large-scale traffic regulation. In this article, we describe three types of results: (i) self-organizing and distributed methods for maintaining and collecting data (using our concept of Hovering Data Clouds ); (ii) adaptive data dissemination for traffic information systems; (iii) methods for self-recognition of traffic jams. We conclude by describing higher-level aspects of our work.

We will demonstrate a wireless sensor network system for the surveillance of critical areas and properties -- e.g. borders. The system consists of up to 10 sensor nodes that monitor a small border area. The protocols we show focus on detecting trespassers across a predefined area and reporting the detection to a gateway node securely. There, the trespasser's path will be graphically diplayed on a border map. The demonstration features secure protocols for the detection of trespassers, node failure and network partitioning, along with a duty cycle protocol to ensure network longevity. All information pertaining to relevant events in the network or border area will be graphically displayed on a gateway computer.

We present an algorithm for computing a compact polygonal boundary of physical phenomena that nodes in a wireless sensor network can detect. It works strictly local and is robust against measurement errors and packet loss. It can deal with non-convex shapes and assumes nothing but location awareness at the nodes and a loose time synchronization. Other than different schemes described in literature our algorithm does not rely on a hierarchical clustered communication structure. After discussing related approaches and introducing our boundary approximation scheme in detail, we show through an extensive set of simulations that it is robust and accurate.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are an increasingly popular class of real-time interactive distributed applications that require scalable architectures and parallelization approaches. While games of the role-playing genre already allow thousands of users to concurrently participate in a single game session, there are important genres, in particular action and strategy games, which have not been scaled to the massively multiplayer realm so far. These games have hard requirements in terms of scalability, in particular regarding density: many players tend to congregate in small locations. In this paper, we outline our novel approach of replication-based parallelisation for scaling the density of players. The practical impact of our work is demonstrated by porting the popular action game QFusion, based on the famous Quake 2, onto our proxy-server system architecture using the replication approach. The experiments with the ported QFusion demonstrate its high responsiveness and show that our approach allows to almost triple the maximum number of simultaneous players on four servers as compared with a single-server version.

Despite the automation in many domains, network management still requires a lot of manual interaction. With the ongoing rapid growth of the Internet and the number of connected devices, the need for automated and intelligent management becomes even higher. Using Web services for management can be seen as a first step towards a better integration of business functions and technical management. However, offering basic management functions through Web services is still not enough for better automation. An autonomic management system is needed, which is able to perform more abstract tasks. These higher level tasks could be aggregated Web service calls. In this paper, we analyze existing techniques for automatic Web service composition and show how they can be used for network management. Moreover, we discuss our implementation of an automatic service composition engine.

Routing within wireless mobile multi-hop networks is a challenging task. Therefore, in the past several routing protocols have been developed with various extensions and adoptions to certain specific scenarios. The consensus of the discussion about routing is that depending on all aspects of their application reaching from number of nodes, mobility, to the data traffic profile of the application developers can choose an optimal routing protocol. In the meantime some routing protocols have evolved as standard choice like AODV, DSR, OLSR, TBRPF. With the advent of sensor networks, requirements like scalability and resource consumption are added to the research domain. This resulted in additional extremely specialized routing algorithms or special extensions to existing protocols. So is there really a need and room for another routing protocol? We are convinced that a really simple, efficient, scalable protocol that allows for mobility and is suited for various performance classes of devices does not exist. We proposeGRAPEas a completely new approach for routing in wireless multi-hop networks and present performance results based on simulations and measurements that demonstrate the potential of the routing approach.

Protocols and applications that rely on unicast and multicast communication are well accepted and still gain more and more popularity. However, these communication paradigms are not optimal for a class of wireless applications where communication partners neither establish specific relationships nor need roles like client and server between each other before data exchange. Applications we have in mind deal with up to several thousands of peers as autonomous wireless network nodes. Nodes communicate events like traffic accidents in a local region or information of common interest to a larger group of network nodes. Intermediate nodes forward or rather "gossip" information like in a social communication model, comparable to the news of the big fire of Rome in neronian times travelling through Europe and finally reaching villages in rural areas. The challenge of such a concept is to find efficient local rules, which balance communication with respect to bandwidth usage, latency of data, and data delivery ratio. We introduce the promising application AutoNomos - a decentralized traffic information system - which is well suited for the evaluation of such a data dissemination protocol. Next, we present our new approach calledAutoCastthat is well optimized and self-adaptable towards various dynamic topologies. We compareAutoCastagainst the theoretical optimum and existing data dissemination protocols. Finally, simulations will demonstrate the efficiency of the approach.

Information about distances to other nodes in wireless sensor networks has proven advantageous not only for location discovery but is also helpful for context aware applications in general. In this paper we present a novel approach to distance estimation that does neither depend on special hardware nor on unreliable measurements of physical wireless communication properties. Instead, it is inspired by the observation that distant nodes have fewer neighbors in common than close ones and calculates distances from intersection cardinalities of sets of adjacent nodes. We discuss related work and present the new approach in detail including its mathematical foundations. A simulative performance analysis comprising different scenarios shows that our scheme yields competitive results.

In environments with limited network bandwidth or resource-constrained computing devices the high amount of protocol overhead caused by SOAP is disadvantageous. Therefore, recent research work concentrated on more compact, binary representations of XML data. However, due to the special characteristics of SOAP communication most of these approaches are not applicable in the field of Web services. First, we give a detailed overview of the latest developments in the field of XML data compression. Then we will introduce a new approach for compressing SOAP data which utilizes information on the structure of the data from an XML schema or WSDL document to generate a single custom pushdown automaton. This cannot only be used as a highly efficient validating parser but also as a compressor: its transitions are tagged with short binary identifiers which replace XML tags during compression. This approach leads to extremely compact data representations as well as low memory and CPU utilization

Many complex structures in our modern world exist independent of the individual entities they are composed of, giving them an "organic" quality. Important examples include traffic phenomena, e.g., traffic jams; despite of strong efforts over many years, centralized computing has been unable to deal with the resulting problems in a satisfactory manner. With the growing power of sensing devices and wireless communication, participants in traffic are no longer restricted to display passive, particle-like behavior; instead, local data exchange makes it technically feasible to aim for decentralized coordination between cars. One fundamental concept for making use of these possibilities comprises Hovering Data Clouds, which consist of relevant information that is kept by ever-changing carriers; a prototypical scenario arises in a traffic jam, where data is maintained by passing it on to newly arriving cars. In this study, we present algorithmic methods for this concept. This paper is part of project AutoNomos1(www.auto- nomos.de), which aims at traffic control in a decentralized manner.

Positioning sensor nodes requires distance information to reference points. Due to resource limitations in sensor networks, distance determination in low-cost sensor nodes without additional hardware is difficult. Known techniques such as distance estimation based on received signal strength (RSSI) are mostly inaccurate or have limitations. We propose a new method to measure the distance between a transmitting node and a receiving node using the minimal transmission power. The determined distance is more precise than RSSI, has a low variance and is therefore particularly suitable for positioning. Finally, we implemented a demonstrator application using weighted centroid localization to show the practical implementation.

A major drawback of using SOAP for application integration is its enormous demand for network bandwidth. Compared to classical approaches like Java-RMI and CORBA, SOAP messages typically cause more than three times more network traffic. In this paper we will give a detailed survey of state of the art binary encoding strategies for SOAP and introduce a new experimental concept for SOAP compression, which makes use of the commonly available WSDL description of a SOAP Web service.

In this paper we present a modular and extensible visualization framework for wireless sensor networks. These networks have typically no means of visualizing their state, measurements or computational results. Visualization is therefore a key issue to develop and operate these networks. Data emitted by individual sensor nodes is collected by the visualization software and passed to a flexible multi-layer plug-in mechanism that renders the information on a canvas. Developers can easily adapt existing or develop new custom tailored plug-ins for their specific application.

More and more cities and municipal organizations start to offer services restricted to their metropolitan area. Today, many of these service are located in the field of e-government, allowing citizens to perform many of their administrative duties online. However, with wireless networks and mobile devices becoming more powerful and much less expensive, a broad variety of new mobile services can be envisioned. In this paper, we investigate metropolitan services to support mobile virtual groups, i.e., groups of mobile users who have some kind of logical association with each other, but who are distributed throughout the city and are mobile, meaning they might be constantly on the move. As two major services that such groups would like to make use of, we identified voice group communication and localization of group members. In mobile environments, both services pose a number of problems. Based on a typical metropolitan area network infrastructure, we develop solutions for these problems. We also show how these solutions can be integrated into a mobile group application, namely, the communication and localization component of a virtual tourist guide for the city of Heidelberg using members of a tourist group which can move independently but still keep in touch. We also describe measurements and experiences to argue for the feasibility of our approach.

We present the design and the implementation details of a group conferencing tool using only 50% of the bandwidth of a 9.6 kbit/s GSM connection, thus leaving resources for other applications that need to access network resources concurrently. The system architecture with its conferencing server and the clients is described as well as the QoS issues that were crucial during the design of the application. The used protocols and voice codecs are presented and performance constraints and measured results from the actual implementation into a virtual tourist guide are described.

Quality of service (QoS) management is an important issue in today's high-speed distributed systems supporting multimedia applications. Most existing QoS management schemes usually just cope with technical issues of resource reservations and QoS guarantees, often completely neglecting revenue issues which are especially important for service providers in order to maximize their profit. The revenue to be expected does not only depend on the stream itself but also very much on stochastic events such as network failures or QoS violations. A QoS management system taking revenue issues and the possibly stochastic behavior of the environment into account thus seems to be superior to the existing ones. We show how controller programs for such enhanced QoS management systems can be developed based on a new kind of Petri nets, so-called controlled stochastic Petri nets. We show how to numerically analyze such models using a tool environment in order to obtain strategies for the QoS management system.

No abstract available.

In this paper we describe the tool-supported specification and implementation of a multimedia communication protocol on parallel hardware. MCAM is an application layer protocol for movie control, access and management. We specify the full MCAM protocol together with ISO presentation and session layers in Estelle. Using a code generator, we derive parallel C++ code from the specification. The code is compiled and executed on a multiprocessor system under OSF/1 and on UNIX workstations. Measurements show the performance speedup gained by several different configurations of parallel units. We also report on experiences with our methodology.>