About us
From Self-Organizing Systems Group
The Emmy Noether Research Group of Thomas Fuhrmann studies self-organization in computer networks and distributed computing systems. Their results are being applied to adhoc networks, embedded systems, the Internet, peer-to-peer software, and high performance computing. The group is funded by several research grants, both from the federal government and the German Research Foundation.
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Self-organizing systems can be extremely robust and powerful. The lack of centralized components eliminates potential performance bottlenecks and so-called single points of failure. Ideally, in a self-organizing system any part can break at any time without damaging the system as a whole. Moreover, well-designed self-organizing systems perfectly balance demand and supply. Each component that requests a service from the system should also provide another service of equal worth. As a result, such systems scale very well, that means they can grow smoothly up to global scale.
The central research question in the group is the design of microscopic rules that lead to the desired macroscopic behaviour. Which algorithms shall the individual processor nodes execute? What protocols shall they use for the communication? What performance and robustness can we hope or? Scientifically sound results require both, the theoretical analysis of the governing principles and practical experiments with prototype implementations. The group is strong in the combination of these two aspects of computer science research.
