Prof. Dr. Hermann de Meer
University of Passau

Prof. Dr. Scott Shenker
University of California, Berkeley
EECS - Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

The joint research as preparatory work is intended to foster the following major research topics: architectural re-design of the Internet, involving new models for naming, addressing and routing to overcome serious limitations of the current Internet. Working towards a decentralized and information-centric architecture based on the principle of self-organization will be of major interest. Furthermore, security related research with focus on denial-of-service, network availability and resilience will provide a complementing focus. These long-term goals will only be achieved if based on thorough testing in a realistic environment of global scope. Starting with the current PlanetLab overlay infrastructure a more generic testing facility will be investigated. The research on the testing facility is intended to spawn or to feed into other European and US related research initiatives.

Final report:

Because of my visit at UC Berkeley in 2006 in the context of the BaCaTeC-project, several research ideas, which partly deviated from the original research plan, were established, such as “Energy Efficiency in information and communication technology” and, in the aftermath, various “Smart Grid” research topics were newly established at the University of Passau. This made us one of the first universities in Germany, which brought this topic to the center of research attention.

Specifically, we have founded the conference series e-Energy at the University of Passau in 2009. This conference series returned to UC Berkeley in 2013 (Co-Chair Prof. David Culler), now as an ACM SIGCOMM conference, after it took place at Columbia Univ. (H. Schulzrinne) in 2010 and at the J.C. Univ. Madrid (A. M. Marsan) in 2011. In 2014, the conference will be organized by the Univ. of Cambridge (J. Crowcroft).

The research activities resulted, among others, in 5 EU projects (FIT4Green, All4Green, DC4City, HYRIM, COST IC0804), 1 BMBF project (G-Lab_Ener-G) and one EPSRC project. A total of 14 journal articles, two book chapters, and 16 peer-reviewed conference and workshop publications originated from these projects’ results since 2006.

Furthermore, a completed dissertation, which won the Faculty Award, four current dissertations and two current habilitations can be reported.