News and Announcements

• Mengfan Wu just defended his PhD - congratulations!

  September 21, 2026
  
  Mengfan Wu successfully defended his PhD on September 21, 2029. His dissertation is titled Scalable Federated Learning in Heterogeneous Networks: Strategies for Asynchronous, Hierarchical, and Decentralized Systems. He was awarded a Dr.-Ing. degree from TU Berlin.
  (link to more information)

• TKN Team at Berlin 6G Conference 2026

  September 10, 2026
  
  The TKN team joined the 4th Berlin 6G Conference to present our latest research spanning AI-native communications, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), and integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). As part of the xG-RIC Project, we enjoyed exchanging ideas with the community on advancing open, resilient, and intelligent 6G infrastructure. Our team member Joana Angjo presented recent results from our testbed implementation "NLoS Sensing with Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces."
  

• XRain Selected for Deutsche Telekom Incubator Program

  September 09, 2026
  
  Our team member Osman Tugay Basaran’s deep-tech startup, XRain—developing a Trustworthy AI Operating System for Autonomous Next-Generation Wireless Communications(6G and Beyond)—has been selected to join Deutsche Telekom’s hubraum Tangible Tomorrow Program. The program connects high-potential startups directly with Deutsche Telekom’s business and technology units to validate practical use cases and accelerate industry collaboration. Through this engagement, XRain will work alongside D-Telekom’s teams to bring its trustworthy autonomous network solutions closer to real-world deployment for public operators, smart hospitals, and smart factories.
  

• Keynote at GTTI Annual Meeting 2026

  September 09, 2026
  
  Falko Dressler gave a keynote titled Resilient Wireless Communication and Computing in the 6G Era at the GTTI (Gruppo Telecomunicazioni e Tecnologie dell'Informazione) Annual Meeting 2026.
  (link to more information)

• New DFG project HemoCom

  September 04, 2026
  Our proposal HemoCom: Hemodynamics for Molecular Communication in the Flow of Life has been accepted for funding by the German research foundation DFG. In this project, we will explore molecular communication channel characterization in blood, spatio-temporal detection of molecular communication signals, multi-scale simulation and digital twin of molecular communication systems, and application-oriented system demonstration and feedback-based operation.
  (link to more information)

• IEEE ComSoc MBMC Startup Session

  September 03, 2026
  
  Our team members Dilara Aktaş and Jorge Torres Gómez organized the IEEE ComSoc MBMC Startup Session, “From Molecular Communication Research to Startups and Real-World Impact,” on September 3, 2026. The online session brought together researchers, startup experts, and members of the molecular communication community to discuss entrepreneurship, commercialization, funding, and the path from research ideas to real-world impact. Participants actively joined the talks and Q&A discussions. We thank Alyssa Kirst, Prof. Frank H. P. Fitzek, Pit Hofmann, and our team members Sunasheer Bhattacharjee and Osman Tugay Basaran for sharing their valuable experiences and insights.
  

• New IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society article

  August 31, 2026
  
  Our article Joint RIS-RSMA Optimization for Asynchronous Multi-user Cell-Free MIMO has been accepted for publication in IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society. Cell-free multiple-input multiple-output (CF-MIMO) systems assisted by reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) and rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) are promising for interference management in distributed sixth-generation (6G) networks. In practical CF-MIMO deployments, independent access-point (AP) oscillators and unequal propagation delays introduce AP-dependent phase variations that reduce coherent combining and degrade precoding performance. This paper develops a unified RIS-RSMA optimization framework for asynchronous downlink CF-MIMO. The RSMA common precoder, private precoders, and passive RIS phase shifts are jointly optimized within a sum-rate maximization problem subject to total transmit-power, per-user quality-of-service, and RIS unit-modulus constraints. The resulting non-convex problem is addressed through a weighted minimum mean-square error (WMMSE)-based alternating optimization framework with Gauss–Seidel coordinate optimization for the RIS phase subproblem. An analytical common-stream power expression is derived to explain the limited benefit of decoupled common-precoder designs. The analysis shows that independent oscillator phase drifts at the APs attenuate coherent cross-AP combining terms and can restrict the common rate through the weakest-user decoding constraint. In the default overloaded CF-MIMO configuration, the tested heuristic common-precoder schemes provide less than 0.2% gain over the corresponding optimized space-division multiple access (SDMA) baseline when combined with WMMSE-optimized private precoders. In contrast, the proposed joint RSMA design achieves approximately 12–15% sum-rate gain at moderate-to-high transmit powers and retains a similar high-power advantage in a larger-scale validation. Targeted comparisons using WMMSE and regularized zero-forcing (RZF) private precoders, together with the common-power allocation results, support the need for joint common/private precoder design. Additional results show that the gain persists across the tested RIS sizes, oscillator phase-noise variances, Rician factors, loading ratios, channel realizations, and multi-RIS deployments. Distributed multi-RIS deployment also improves spatial coverage uniformity under a fixed total element budget.
  (link to more information)

• Paper Presentation at IEEE FINE 2026

  August 30, 2026
  
  Our team member Tehmina Bibi presented our paper titled PhySynth: A Physics-Based Synthetic UWB/IMU Data Generator for Training of ML-based Tracking at the IEEE International Conference on Future and Intelligent Networking (FINE 2026), which took place in Osaka, Japan.
  

• New IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing article

  August 16, 2026
  
  Our article Efficient and Green Service Function Chain Deployment and Scheduling for Mobile Edge Computing has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Service Function Chain (SFC) decomposes a user's overall service into multiple service components and links them in an orderly manner, providing more flexible, efficient, and responsive services for compute-intensive applications in mobile edge computing. Existing research primarily focuses on optimizing the deployment cost and system efficiency of SFC. However, the dynamic nature of user trajectories, along with the absence of adaptive scheduling and service component sharing in complex and heterogeneous environments, hinders existing approaches from achieving optimal resource efficiency. To achieve adaptive optimization of SFC deployment and efficient component sharing across multiple SFCs, we propose an SFC Deployment and Scheduling strategy based on the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm, named SAC-DS. The proposed SAC-DS strategy first employs a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to predict user trajectories, thereby accurately forecasting future service demands. Based on these predictions, an SAC-based agent is trained to dynamically optimize SFC deployment and scheduling policies in real time. SAC-DS integrates SFC deployment, component sharing, and scheduling into a unified framework, effectively improving system throughput while minimizing overall deployment costs, thereby enhancing user experience. Compared with existing baseline methods, SAC-DS improves network throughput by 3.1%–18.1% and reduces average cost by 1.8%-10.0%.
  (link to more information)

• Special issue in IEEE TMBMC

  August 04, 2026
  Our team member Jorge Torres Gómez is leading a special issue for the IEEE Trans. On Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications. As lead guest editor he is teaming with life science partners at Charité Universitätsmedizin and Michigan State University. The special issue is planned to publish contributions that demonstrate the creation of datasets for molecular communication scenarios.
  

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