Marco Zimmerling

I am a full professor at TU Darmstadt. My research interests are in the area of cyber-physical systems, with a focus on wireless embedded systems. Overall, I aim at designing and building real systems that are provably dependable, highly adaptive, and sustainable by design.

Previously, I was a full professor at University of Freiburg and, from 2015 until 2022, a research group leader at the Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden at TU Dresden. I completed my PhD in computer engineering in 2015 at ETH Zurich in the group of Lothar Thiele. I hold a diploma degree in computer science from TU Dresden. For my thesis project, I visited the groups of Thiemo Voigt at RISE Kista and Per Gunningberg at Uppsala University. During my studies, I interned at IBM for over a year, including a six-month stay at the T.J. Watson Research Center.

To find out more about my work, check out my CV and summaries of key achievements: embracing packet collisions, end-to-end guarantees, and distributed battery-free systems. I also invite you to take a look at our research, publications, and teaching activities.

Selected recent peer-reviewed publications

• Carsten Herrmann and Marco Zimmerling. RSSISpy: Inspecting Concurrent Transmissions in the Wild. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN), Linz (Austria), October 2022. Best Paper Award.
• Kai Geissdoerfer and Marco Zimmerling. Learning to Communicate Effectively Between Battery-free Devices. In Proceedings of the 19th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Renton (WA, USA), April 2022. Community Award.
• Fabian Mager, Dominik Baumann, Carsten Herrmann, Sebastian Trimpe, and Marco Zimmerling. Scaling Beyond Bandwidth Limitations: Wireless Control With Stability Guarantees Under Overload. ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems. Volume 6, Issue 3. July 2022.
• Kai Geissdoerfer and Marco Zimmerling. Bootstrapping Battery-free Wireless Networks: Efficient Neighbor Discovery and Synchronization in the Face of Intermittency. In Proceedings of the 18th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Online, April 2021.
• Dominik Baumann, Fabian Mager, Ulf Wetzker, Lothar Thiele, Marco Zimmerling, and Sebastian Trimpe. Wireless Control for Smart Manufacturing: Recent Approaches and Open Challenges. Proceedings of the IEEE. Volume 109, Issue 4. April 2021.
• Marco Zimmerling, Luca Mottola, and Silvia Santini. Synchronous Transmissions in Low-Power Wireless: A Survey of Communication Protocols and Network Services. ACM Computing Surveys. Volume 53, Issue 6. December 2020.
• Fabian Mager, Dominik Baumann, Romain Jacob, Lothar Thiele, Sebastian Trimpe, and Marco Zimmerling. Feedback Control Goes Wireless: Guaranteed Stability over Low-power Multi-hop Networks. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS), Montreal (QC, Canada), April 2019. [presentation] Best Paper Award.

Selected honors and awards

• ACM SIGBED Early Career Researcher Award, 2022
• Test of Time Award, ACM Int. Conf. on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2013
• Community Award, USENIX Symp. on Networked Systems Design and Implement. (NSDI), 2022
• Best Paper Award, Int. Conf. on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN), 2022
• Future Prize, Ewald Marquardt Foundation, 2019
• Best Paper Award, ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS), 2019
• Best Demo Award, ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2019
• DFG Emmy Noether Grant (1.7 million Euro for 5 years), 2018
• EDAA Outstanding Dissertation Award, 2016
• ACM SIGBED Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award, 2015
• Best Paper Award, ACM Int. Conf. on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2013
• Best Paper Award, ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2011