They observe geographic areas, regulate processes in smart buildings, as well as monitor and control machines on the shop floor. Tiny, autonomous sensor actuator systems connected to one another through a network are already being used in many sectors and will become even more important as digitization progresses. To allow the technology to become more established on the market, however, one or two little weaknesses have yet to be remedied. These include among other things overlong transmission times when communicating within the sensor networks.

Together with partners in the “fast realtime” project, researchers in the EAS division of Fraunhofer IIS in Dresden are investigating how to optimize this latency to between 1–10 ms – this corresponds de facto to real-time communication. Hereby, the project partners are pursuing two different approaches. In the first approach, they investigate the optimization potential of existing design methods of distributed systems. In the second approach, they intend to fundamentally question the status quo and establish design guidelines for a new type of system design specifically intended for latency optimization.

Within their work package, the Dresden- based scientists are concentrating on tangible applications from industrial automation, such as a motion control system. They are investigating special wireless systems whose cycle times are still too long for many areas of application. In order to obtain realistic research results from which suitable design specifications can be derived, they carry out experiments on a prototype while also taking reusable safety components into account. “Fast realtime” is being funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of its “Zwanzig20 – Partnerschaft für Innovation” funding program.