Advanced Seminar Embedded Systems and Internet of Things

Topic 3 "Comparison of different methods for schedule synthesis for time-triggered traffic in TSN networks" is still available for the summer semester 2021. If you are interested, please send your application to seminar.esi.ei@tum.de as described below.

Application Process

Due to the high interest in our seminar topics we use an application process to assign the topics.

If you are interested in one of the topics below, please send your application together with your CV and your transcript of records to seminar.esi.ei@tum.de. Express your interest and explain why you want to have that specific topic and why you think that you are most suitable for the topic. This allows us to choose the most suitable candidate for the desired topic to maximize the seminar's learning outcome and to avoid dropouts.

Additionally, you can indicate a second topic that you would like to take, such that we can still find a topic for you if your primary choice is not available.

Deadline: The topics will be available the latest by 17.03.2021. We encourage you to apply until 31.03.2021. Afterwards we will assign the topics and notify all applicants on 01.04.2021. If there are still topics open after this date we will answer to applications within 3 days. Once you are assigned to a topic, we will ask for your confirmation.

Note: We do not assign topics on a first-come-first-served basis. Even though we appreciate your interest if you have asked or applied early for a topic we can not guarantee that you get a seat. Generally we have 3-4 applicants per topic. Please think carefully if you are able to do the work required as we have to reject other students.

Kick-off meeting

This semester the seminar will be conducted as an online class. You will have weekly meetings with your supervisor via Zoom while lecture materials and videos will be available on Moodle.

The kick-off meeting will be on the 14.04.2021 at 9:45 on Zoom. We ask all selected participants who have accepted a topic to be present in the kick-off meeting. Please notify us in case you can not make it to the meeting, otherwise we will assume that you are no longer interested and give your place to another applicant.

Seminar Registration

The registration for the seminar will be done manually by us after the kick-off meeting as only students selected by our application process are able to take part in the course.

Topics

This semester we offer six topics for the advanced seminar "Embedded Systems and Internet of Things".

You will find the description of the topics below. Furthermore, we gave you a few references for each topic as a starting point for your research. Your task for each topic will be to read and analyze related literature, get an overview of the current state-of-the-art and summarize your findings in a paper-style report. Afterwards you will present your findings in a "mini-conference" in front of your fellow students.

During the seminar you will also learn through the lecture how to conduct the research, how to write a scientific paper and how to present your work.

 

1. IoT Security: TESLA Broadcast Authentication

TESLA is a security protocol to authenticate sensor broadcasts without symmetric keys (MACs) or the need of expensive public-key cryptography. The protocol uses hash functions to commit to the sensor data and a private secret first and only later (after a certain time period) reveals both to prove authenticity. While TESLA is not heavily in use today, its lightweight properties are promising for IoT applications.
Your task is to understand and summarize the detailed working mechanisms of the TESLA protocol and its improvements. Therefore, you should also identify and summarize the major contributions that have been made so far since the original publication from 2000.

References:

Supervisor: Emanuel Regnath

Assigned

2. Interaction Protocols in Multi Agent Systems from a Web of Things Point of View

In Multi Agent Systems, Interaction Protocols is an area of research that focuses on specifying how different Agents should communicate with each other to accomplish a certain protocol, which can be thought as an application logic.
There are different types of interaction protocols (see reference 1) as well as ways to specify them.
In most (or all) the cases, the agents are considered to have and share the knowledge of the protocol, which is feasible only in closed frameworks and thus not applicable to loosely coupled IoT systems where different devices (sensors and actuators) from different manufacturers can exist which are mostly built for specific purposes.

The Web of Things (WoT) and the standardization efforts around it however focus on devices that have affordances, i.e. capabilities that can be invoked by other entities in a network (see Chapter 11.1 of Reference 2). This makes it difficult to deploy complex interaction protocols where both parties are considered to be able to drive the application logic equally.

After doing a literature review on the Interaction Protocols and their specifications, a comparison with ways to describe WoT applications (see reference 3) is desired.

References:

Supervisor: Ege Korkan

Assigned

3. Comparison of different methods for schedule synthesis for time-triggered traffic in TSN networks

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of Ethernet sub-standards defined in the IEEE 802.1 TSN Task Group, aiming at providing Ethernet with real-time communication, reconfiguration and reliability services in the layer 2 of network architecture.

Time-triggered communication related to 802.1Qbv substand is one of the critical technologies in TSN network. The scheduling problem for the time-triggered traffic is known to be NP-hard as the computational complexity. There are multiple research work for exploring optimization and improvement of the schedule synthesis for TT traffic.
For this topic, you will learn about the incremental improvements of these different methods. You need to give an overview and comparison of current existing research on schedule synthesis for TT traffic in TSN networks.

References:

Supervisor: Luxi Zhao

Unassigned

4. Comparison of network calculus tools on performance evaluation for real-time networks

Performance analysis/schedulability analysis is an important topic for real-time networks. Network Calculus (NC) is a formal performance analysis method based on mathemathical model which can be used to calculate the upper bounds of worst-case delays and backlogs of flows traversing through the network.

There are several libraries of the Network Calculus tool which supply basic algebra or models related NC to estimate network performance. For this topic, you should learn about the basic idea of NC approach, and compare different NC tool libraries.

References:

Supervisor: Luxi Zhao

Assigned

5. Fail-Operational Automotive Systems

A fail-operational behaviour of safety-critical software for autonomous driving is essential as there is no driver available as a backup solution. Fail-operational behaviour requires failure detection and switching to a redundant system component. This behaviour can be achieved on different architectural levels, e.g. on the system level or on the processor level.  For this topic, you should generate an overview over the architectures used in literature to enable a fail-operational behaviour in automotive systems.

References:

Supervisor: Philipp Weiß

Assigned

6. Dynamic Cloud Offloading in Automotive Systems

As more and more software functions are being integrated in automotive systems, the demand for computational power in vehicles is increasing. However, the rising energy consumption of on-board ECUs can have a significant influence on the overall power consumption of electric vehicles, which might not only result in lower driving ranges, but also in additional CO2 emissions depending on the source of the energy. Using cloud systems to dynamically offload tasks can significantly lower the power consumption. For this topic you should generate an overview of existing approaches which dynamically offload tasks from a vehicle to a cloud to reduce the on-board computational load.

References:

Supervisor: Philipp Weiß

Assigned