My main research area within the NES group is the design and evaluation of wireless mesh protocols for communication in Cyber-Physical Systems. I’m especially interested in mesh networking concepts that leverage Synchronous Transmissions (STX) to improve the dependability and efficiency of communication, which are both key requirements for industrial applications. I’m also currently contributing to the OpenSTX initiative, which aims to standardize STX-based networks.
I received an Engineer’s degree in Computer Science from the Silesian University of Technology (Poland) and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from TU Darmstadt (Germany). Alongside my studies, I gained five years of practical experience in the software industry, mostly designing, developing, and maintaining Java-based web applications in the banking domain. I have always been fascinated by the technical challenges that arise at the intersection of distributed systems and embedded systems. Therefore, after graduating in 2025, I joined the NES Lab, where I can contribute to this field of research.
Publications
2026
Rzepka, Michał; Herrmann, Carsten; Zimmerling, Marco
@misc{rzepka2026posterCouldStxChallenge6tisch,
title = {Poster Abstract: Could a Wireless Stack Based on Synchronous Transmissions Challenge 6TiSCH?},
author = {Michał Rzepka and Carsten Herrmann and Marco Zimmerling},
doi = {10.1109/SenSys-Adjunct71932.2026.00062},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-05-12},
urldate = {2026-05-12},
abstract = {Synchronous transmissions (STX) and routing represent two distinct approaches to communication in low-power wireless networks. Over time, increasingly sophisticated networking architectures have emerged from both paradigms, including solutions with complete IPv6 support. 6TiSCH and 6Mixer are network stacks representing routing and STX, respectively. In this work, we evaluate how these modern stacks compare under identical, real-world conditions. We discuss the steps required to establish a fair experimental setup and present preliminary results for one of the defined scenario groups, namely a wireless sensor network. We observe that 6TiSCH offers a better trade-off between latency and duty cycle. However, it also exhibits recurring stability issues, manifested by drops in reliability below 70%, which become more frequent as the traffic load increases. In contrast, 6Mixer maintains a 100% reliability, as well as predictable latency values, regardless of the imposed load.},
howpublished = {Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Embedded Artificial Intelligence and Sensing Systems (SenSys)},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {presentation}
}
Synchronous transmissions (STX) and routing represent two distinct approaches to communication in low-power wireless networks. Over time, increasingly sophisticated networking architectures have emerged from both paradigms, including solutions with complete IPv6 support. 6TiSCH and 6Mixer are network stacks representing routing and STX, respectively. In this work, we evaluate how these modern stacks compare under identical, real-world conditions. We discuss the steps required to establish a fair experimental setup and present preliminary results for one of the defined scenario groups, namely a wireless sensor network. We observe that 6TiSCH offers a better trade-off between latency and duty cycle. However, it also exhibits recurring stability issues, manifested by drops in reliability below 70%, which become more frequent as the traffic load increases. In contrast, 6Mixer maintains a 100% reliability, as well as predictable latency values, regardless of the imposed load.
