Marco Zimmerling

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

Previously, I was a full professor at the University of Freiburg and, from 2015 until 2022, an independent research group leader at the Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden at TU Dresden. In 2015, I completed my PhD in computer engineering 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 learn 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

• Kai Geissdoerfer, Ingmar Splitt, Matthias Sokolowski, Carsten Herrmann, Jonas Kubicki, Jasper de Winkel, and Marco Zimmerling. Shepherd Nova: A Public Testbed for Rigorous Experiments Under Repeatable Energy-Harvesting Conditions. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), Anaheim (CA, USA), June 2025.
• Kai Geissdoerfer and Marco Zimmerling. Riotee: An Open-Source Hardware and Software Platform for the Battery-free Internet of Things. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), Hangzhou (China), November 2024.
• Saad Ahmed, Bashima Islam, Kasim Sinan Yildirim, Marco Zimmerling, Przemysław Pawełczak, Muhammad Hamad Alizai, Brandon Lucia, Luca Mottola, Jacob Sorber, and Josiah Hester. The Internet of Batteryless Things. Communications of the ACM. Volume 67, Issue 3. February 2024.
• Milan Deumer, Moid Sandhu, Sara Khalifa, Brano Kusy, Kai Geissdoerfer, Marco Zimmerling, and Raja Jurdak. A Battery-free Wearable System for On-device Human Activity Recognition Using Kinetic Energy Harvesting. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN), Rende (Italy), September 2023.
• Andreas Biri, Reto Da Forno, Tobias Kuonen, Fabian Mager, Marco Zimmerling, and Lothar Thiele. Hydra: Concurrent Coordination for Fault-tolerant Networking. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), San Antonio (TX, USA), May 2023. Best Artifact Award.
• 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.

Selected honors and awards

• Best Artifact Award, ACM/IEEE Conf. on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2023
• ACM SIGBED Early Career Researcher Award, 2022
• Test-of-Time Award, ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2022
• Community Award, USENIX Symp. on Networked Systems Design and Implement. (NSDI), 2022
• Best Paper Award, ACM 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 Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2013
• Best Paper Award, ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2011

Recent, current, and upcoming service

• MobiCom 2026: Program committee
• SenSys 2026: Program committee
• EMSOFT 2025: Program committee
• EWSN 2025: Co-chair of Rising Stars Forum
• NSDI 2025: Program committee
• EWSN 2024: Program committee
• SenSys 2023: Program committee
• EWSN 2023: Program committee
• ECRTS 2023: Program committee
• ACM TIOT (2023-today): Associate editor
• EWSN 2022: Program committee
• SenSys 2021: Program committee
• MobiSys 2021: Program committee
• EWSN 2021: Co-chair of PhD Forum
• IPSN 2021: Program committee
• SenSys 2020: Program committee
• ICDCS 2020: Program committee
• IPSN 2020: Program committee, co-chair of PhD Forum
• ICCPS 2020: Program committee