Rute C. Sofia

I lead industrial IoT research at fortiss, working on deterministic wireless networking, AI-driven network orchestration, and 6G. Over more than 20 years across industry (Siemens AG, Nokia Siemens Networks), academia, and entrepreneurship, I have published 90+ peer-reviewed papers, hold 8 patents, and contributed to IETF/IRTF standardisation. I have coordinated international programmes totalling over €30M, including the Horizon Europe project CODECO, and I supervise postdoctoral researchers, PhD and Master’s students, and working students in networking and distributed systems. I am an IEEE and ACM Senior Member, active in AIOTI and the 6G Infrastructure Association, and I regularly give invited talks and keynotes at international conferences.

My work builds foundations for adaptive, resilient, and scalable IIoT infrastructures: IoT-Edge-Cloud continuum architectures, semantic system behaviour for real-time adaptation, and AI-driven infrastructures that support distributed intelligence.

Keywords: IoT-Edge-Cloud; networking architectures and protocols; AI-driven orchestration; deterministic wireless networking; 6G

08.2026: New white paper: Software-Defined Defence: A perspective on civilian-to-defence research transfer to SDD

fortiss has published a new white paper, “Software-Defined Defence: A perspective on civilian-to-defence research transfer to SDD,” authored by Rute C. Sofia, Daniel Mendez, Simon Barner, Hao Shen, Julian Wörmann, Andrea Stocco, Axel von Arnim, Holger Pfeifer and Alexander Pretschner.

Military capability is increasingly determined by software, yet defence platforms are procured over decades while the software and AI models they carry must change in days or even hours. The paper calls this mismatch the lifecycle paradox and argues that it is the central engineering problem Software-Defined Defence must solve. It frames SDD across three intertwined dimensions: software and systems engineering, AI engineering, and connectivity and infrastructure engineering.

Rather than starting from a clean slate, the paper builds on technologies already proven in civilian domains such as automotive, manufacturing, space and energy. It proposes a continuous, DevOps-style engineering loop in which model-based systems engineering and simulation-based testing front-load design and verification, while tactical connectivity and low-power edge execution carry that design into contested operation. Continuous cybersecurity compliance, continuous assurance and variability management run beneath both phases. For each capability, the paper states what is already validated and what remains an open transfer problem under adversarial or defence-certified conditions.

The paper closes with recommendations for researchers, industry, policymakers and defence agencies across three horizons: a testing, compliance and connectivity baseline for 2026 to 2027, certification, assurance and orchestration pipelines for 2027 to 2029, and validation of the full loop under realistic operational conditions by 2029 to 2030. It also shows how closing the SDD gap can meet European and German legislation such as the AI Act and GDPR while keeping civic benefits.

07.2026: New white paper: Toward Open and Sustainable Global Connectivity — Common Visions on Networking Systems and Architectures

New white paper, just published: "Toward Open and Sustainable Global Connectivity, Common Visions on Networking Systems and Architectures" — a joint outcome of the INSTAR 5G+/6G European Task Force and Korean experts led by TTA. Co-edited with Samyuktha Indrasena. The paper maps where European and Korean 6G roadmaps converge — AI-native architectures, Open RAN, the IoT-Edge-Cloud continuum, non-terrestrial networks, and sustainability-by-design — and identifies 10 concrete standardisation gaps for joint EU-Korea contributions ahead of the 3GPP Release 20/21 pre-normative window closing in 2027. Now openly available on Zenodo (CC BY 4.0), DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21257544.

07.2026: Application orchestration across Edge-Cloud, to centralize or not?

"To centralise or not to centralise" — in federated container orchestration, that's not a philosophical question, it's an architectural decision with real consequences. Centralise too much, and you get a single point of failure that activates exactly when you need it least. Decentralise too much, and governance consistency and policy enforcement become impossible across multi-domain infrastructures.

New article on how the CODECO Project navigates that tension — covering four priority areas, the open questions the project started from, and the concrete architectural answers built in response.

07.2026: CFP: "Advancing 6G via International Research to Standardisation Synergies" — joint CONASENSE/INSTAR workshop at IEEE WPMC 2026

Call for Papers: "Advancing 6G via International Research to Standardisation Synergies," a joint full-day workshop between the Horizon Europe INSTAR project and the 6G CONASENSE platform, co-organised at IEEE WPMC 2026. The workshop bridges forefront 6G research with pre-normative standardisation, bringing together experts from the EU, Japan, South Korea, India, Brazil, and the USA. Topics span 6G system architectures, AI-native networking, Edge-Cloud-IoT continuum, quantum-safe security, joint communication/sensing/positioning, non-terrestrial networks, and international 6G roadmap alignment. The programme includes keynotes on national 6G visions, technical paper sessions, and a panel on aligning research with global standards.

Key dates:

Abstract submission: 30 July 2026
Full paper submission: 30 August 2026
Notification of acceptance: 10 September 2026
Camera-ready deadline: 15 September 2026
Workshop: 8 November 2026

06.2026: ns-3 DetNetWiFi new release

Update to the Wi-Fi/TSN DetNetWiFi framework. Ported to ns3-48, it supports Ethernet/TSN/Wi-Fi 6 scenarios and a novel TAS to EDCA mapping as proposed in our publication "Exploratory Analysis of Wi-Fi 6 Dynamic Resource Unit Sharing in Small-Scale Network Scenarios"

06.2026: TSMatch new release

New open-source release: TSMatch, a project from our IIoT group addressing ML-based semantic matching between IoT Things and services. Code available on our fortiss GitLab. This version provides support for human-centric commands, and integration of FIT-IoT experiments as data sources. Check the demo here

06.2026: INSTAR Standards concludes

INSTAR, the EU-funded project shaping international ICT standardization where fortiss led the B5G/6G workstream, closed with its final event at AFNOR in Paris on 23 June 2026 — co-located with the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 41 IoT and Digital Twin plenary. Over its Horizon Europe-funded run (Jan 2024–June 2026), INSTAR signed 4 Memoranda of Understanding with international partners and engaged 900+ stakeholders. The 6G Task Force, led by us in fortiss (Rute C. Sofia, Samyuktha Indrasena) ran alignment workshops with Korea's TTA and Japan's JBCE/TTC, resulting in a joint white paper on networking systems and architectures — directly building on the Human-centric and Sustainable 6G Services work I've been involved in.

05.2026: New paper, IEEE Computer

New paper in IEEE Computer: "A CODECO Case Study and Initial Validation for Edge Orchestration of Autonomous Mobile Robots," with Hongyu Zhu and Tina Samizadeh. The work validates CODECO's edge orchestration framework on a concrete use case — autonomous mobile robots — building on the CODECO cognitive, decentralized container orchestration framework published earlier.

05.2026: Project BayVFP RIVER starts

Excited to join RIVER — a BayVFP-funded project led by Energyminer GmbH, developing next-generation AI-driven infrastructure for hydrokinetic power plants, using Energyminer's Energyfish as the case study. The Energyfish generates renewable energy directly from river currents — a clean, continuous, and largely untapped source. The mission: make it smarter, more resilient, and ready to scale.

Three fortiss research groups are collaborating on this:

AST (Automated Software Testing), led by Andrea Stocco — digital twinning and AI-driven simulation to close the sim-to-real gap and validate the Energyfish under realistic and extreme conditions.
ASCI (Architectures and Services for Critical Infrastructures), led by Markus Duchon — climate sensing and energy model optimization, integrating environmental monitoring data for flood early warning and long-term operational efficiency.
IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things), led by Rute C. Sofia — IoT-Edge-Cloud communications and wireless Energyfish interconnection, enabling reliable, low-power connectivity for deployed units via LoRa, LoRaWAN, and Wi-Fi HaLow across the IoT-Edge-Cloud continuum.

04.2026: CODECO and Greenness Observability

At the fortiss IIoT Lab, we're building the layers of a reliable, intelligent IoT-Edge-Cloud continuum:

Deterministic networking — bounded latency, low jitter, tight synchronisation, open to the community via ns-3 DetNetWiFi.
Cognitive orchestration — the CODECO Project: decentralised, AI-driven Edge-Cloud orchestration, adaptive by design.
Semantic interoperability — TSMatch: automated IoT device-to-service integration, demonstrated at ACM SIGCOMM 2025.
Semantic communications — meaning-oriented architectures for 6G IIoT, targeting ultra-low latency and seamless mobility.

The vision: a continuum that's intelligent, interoperable, and energy-accountable — where cognitive systems observe, adapt, and optimise across network, compute, and energy-awareness dimensions at once. The open frontiers we're actively working on: energy-aware observability and network digital twins for energy-efficient industrial networks.

03.2026: HE CODECO Final Event

The Horizon Europe CODECO project — the cognitive, decentralized edge-cloud orchestration framework I coordinated — held its final event on 24 March. The project's outcomes continue to evolve through Eclipse KuDECO, an Eclipse Foundation technology project coordinated by us carrying the CODECO solutions for decentralized cloud-edge ecosystems forward.

01.2026: CODECO @ HiPEAC 2026

HiPEAC 2026, Europe's premier computing-systems conference, ran 26–28 January in Kraków. A workshop on edge-cloud architectures, orchestration and standardization presented the newly launched Open Federated Edge-cloud Infrastructure Alliance, discussing sovereign, intelligent, hyper-distributed edge-cloud systems for Europe — directly in the space CODECO and the fortiss IIoT group work in.

12.2025: Should AI become an Intergenerational Right?

New paper (under submission) with Jon Crowcroft, Dirk Trossen, and Vassilis Tsaoussidis: "Should AI Become an Intergenerational Civil Right?" The paper argues that access to AI — much of it built on publicly produced knowledge — shouldn't be treated purely as a commercial service, but as a fundamental civil interest requiring protection, particularly given AI's dependence on finite energy, networking, and compute resources. We propose recognizing AI access as an Intergenerational Civil Right, and sketch a technical path toward it: drawing on IoT-Edge-Cloud computing, decentralized inference, and energy-aware networking, we outline a strawman architecture for AI Delivery Networks that could support equitable access under real resource constraints.

12.2025: AIOTI white paper: Energy–6G Convergence: a Perspective

New white paper with Natalie Samovich: "Energy–6G Convergence: a Perspective," published by the AIOTI Working Group Energy in collaboration with the 6G Infrastructure Association. Europe's energy system is undergoing a profound shift — decarbonization, electrification, decentralization, digitalization — and this paper argues 6G can only become a genuine enabler of that transition if its capabilities are aligned with the safety-critical, long-lived, sustainability-driven nature of energy infrastructure. A central conclusion: observability, security, and sustainability are prerequisites for trust — without standardized energy and carbon metrics linking communication services to measurable energy-system outcomes, 6G's contribution to the energy transition can't be credibly assessed.

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