Personal website of

Dr.-Ing. Christoph Sommer

Short Bio (see professional activities)

Christoph Sommer received his Ph.D. degree in engineering (Dr.-Ing., with distinction) and his M.Sc. degree in computer science (Dipl.-Inf. Univ.) from the University of Erlangen in 2011 and 2006, respectively. In 2010, he was a visiting scholar with the research group of Ozan K. Tonguz at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). In 2012, he was a visiting scholar with the research group of Mario Gerla at the Computer Science Department of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is currently a PostDoc with the Computer and Communication Systems group at the University of Innsbruck. Since 2011, he is a member of the ACM/Springer Wireless Networks (WINET) editorial board. His research is focused on questions regarding traffic efficiency and safety, as well as on security aspects of Car-to-X communication in heterogeneous environments.

Selected Publications (see full list)

• David Eckhoff and Christoph Sommer, "Driving for Big Data? Privacy Concerns in Vehicular Networking," IEEE Security and Privacy, vol. 12 (1), pp. 77-79, February 2014. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
• Christoph Sommer, David Eckhoff and Falko Dressler, "IVC in Cities: Signal Attenuation by Buildings and How Parked Cars Can Improve the Situation," IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2014. (to appear) [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
• Lung-Chih Tung, Jorge Mena, Mario Gerla and Christoph Sommer, "A Cluster Based Architecture for Intersection Collision Avoidance Using Heterogeneous Networks," Proceedings of 12th IFIP/IEEE Annual Mediterranean Ad Hoc Networking Workshop (Med-Hoc-Net 2013), Ajaccio, Corsica, France, June 2013. [BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
• Christoph Sommer, Björn Scheuermann, Tessa Tielert and Björn Schünemann, "Proceedings of the 1st GI/ITG KuVS Fachgespräch Inter-Vehicle Communication (FG-IVC 2013)," University of Innsbruck, Institute of Computer Science, Technical Report, CCS-2013-01, February 2013. [BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
• Christoph Sommer, Stefan Joerer, Michele Segata, Ozan K. Tonguz, Renato Lo Cigno and Falko Dressler, "How Shadowing Hurts Vehicular Communications and How Dynamic Beaconing Can Help," Proceedings of 32nd IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2013), Mini-Conference, Turin, Italy, April 2013, pp. 110-114. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
• Christoph Sommer, Ozan K. Tonguz and Falko Dressler, "Traffic Information Systems: Efficient Message Dissemination via Adaptive Beaconing," IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 49 (5), pp. 173-179, May 2011. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
• Christoph Sommer, Reinhard German and Falko Dressler, "Bidirectionally Coupled Network and Road Traffic Simulation for Improved IVC Analysis," IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 10 (1), pp. 3-15, January 2011. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]