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Technische Universität München

Master Seminar - Networks in the Sky

Important Information

  • Duration: 12.10.2026 – 05.02.2027:
    • All classes take place weekly on a Wednesday from 9:00 to 10:00 in Room 01.07.014.
  • Registration
    • Using the Matching System of the department (mandatory).
    • You can also submit to paulo.mendes [at] tum.de a short motivation statement (max. 150 words) about your participation in this seminar.
    • Sending a motivation statement is optional, but may increase your chances of getting a place.
    • Seminar material downloaded from Moodle.
  • Schedule:
    • Intro session (lectures explaining the topics)
      • 3 classes (12.10.2026; 19.10.2026; 28.10.2026)
    • Ideation session (students present their ideas and plans for the topic)
      • 2 classes (11.11.2026; 18.11.2026)
    • Sprint Session
      • 3 classes (25.11.2026; 02.12.2026; 09.12.2026)
    • Interim Demo
      • 1 class (16.12.2026)
    • Sprint Session
      • 3 classes (13.01.2027; 20.01.2027, 27.01.2027)
    • Final Demo (Exam)
      • 1 class (03.02.2027)
  • ECTS: 5.
  • Capacity: 12.
  • Module ID: IN2107, IN4493

Course Description

The sky is becoming a network substrate. Decades of work on Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs) established the foundations for self-organising wireless networks with airborne nodes. Today this converges with two accelerating developments: the mass deployment of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations delivering globally ubiquitous Internet access, and the recognition that UAVS and aircraft can constitute a large, predictable, and underutilised mesh network operating continuously above different areas of the globe.
This seminar, Networks in the Sky, addresses airborne and spaceborne networking, from UAV swarms and military/commercial aircraft to LEO constellations, as instances of a unified class of time-varying networks. The shared challenge is designing architectures, protocols, and services for networks whose topology changes continuously, whose nodes move at speeds that challenge terrestrial assumptions, and whose connectivity to ground infrastructure is intermittent or absent.

In this seminar, we will explore seminal papers in the field of network architectures, protocols and services. These papers will help us to characterise different aspects of these networks such as airborne network structure, connectivity and swarm coordination, routing across dynamic topologies, as well as handover and security protocols for 5G NTN.

This seminar will be conducted in collaboration with Airbus Central Research and Technology in Ottobrunn, including the possibility of a visit to a relevant research lab.

Learning Outcomes / Study Goals

Participants will learn how to critically develop scientific work. This will be achieved by reviewing papers, reproducing experimental results, and summarising the essentials in a written report, as well as by actively participating in group discussions during the seminar presentations.

What are you required to do?

  • Select a technical topic with your teammates (teams of 3 students max).
  • Build a software-based system to replicate the results of a selected paper.
  • Present your work to an audience with a presentation, a working demo, and documentation.

Teaching and Learning Methods

Lecture with exercises.

Prerequisites

  • This seminar is for students in the Informatics Master program.
  • Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field.

Further Reading

Any technical topic in the area of networking systems involving aerospace platforms is suitable as a working item. Students can propose their own topic for validation (send it to paulo.mendes [at] tum.de). Proposed topics need to be supported by a recent scientific paper and must have code available on GitHub.

For 2026, the suggested topics are:

A) 5G and NTN

  • End-to-end performance:
    • Paper: “5G NR Non-Terrestrial Networks: From Early Results to the Road Ahead” (2026)
  • Mobility and handover
    • Paper: "Secure and Efficient Group Handover Protocol in 5G Non-Terrestrial Networks" (2024)
  • 3GPP procedure decomposition
    • Paper: “Serverless5GC: Private 5G Core Deployment via a Procedure-as-a-Function Architecture” (2026)

B) UAV Swarms

  • Robustness and coordination
    • Paper: “SwarmRaft: Leveraging Consensus for Robust Drone Swarm Coordination in GNSS-Degraded Environments” (2025)
  • Reliability and self-organization
    • Paper: “Multi-hop Differential Topology based Algorithms for Resilient Network of UAV Swarm” (2024)

C) Aeronautical Mesh Networks

  • Routing and performance
    • Paper: “Deep Reinforcement Learning Aided Packet-Routing For Aeronautical Ad-Hoc Networks Formed by Passenger Planes” (2021)
  • Performance
    • Paper: “Minimum-Delay Routing for Integrated Aeronautical Ad Hoc Networks Relying on Passenger-Planes in the North-Atlantic Region” (2020)

D) LEO Constellations

  • Operation
    • Paper: “Democratizing LEO Satellite Network Measurement” (2023)
  • Performance
    • Paper: “Horizon: Understanding and Predicting Global Starlink Performance” (2026)

Contact

For more information or to apply for the course, please contact both Marcin Bosk and Mehmet Mert Beşe!

 

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