Self-adaptive Systems (SASs) are one way to address the ever growing complexity of software systems by allowing the system to react on changes in its operating environment. In today’s systems, self-adaptation is typically realized with a control loop, from which the MAPE-K feedback loop is a prominent example. Research uses the notion of patterns to describe the distribution and decentralization of individual control loop components or control loops and their underlying managed subsystems. While there are some well accepted standards about which components an managed subsystem has to implement so that it can interact with the control loop, research still lacks best practices for communication within and across control loops. This paper aims to identify several research challenges which exist currently in this domain. Furthermore, ideas on upcoming research to create distributed SASs on the basis of roles, distributed benchmarks for SASs and inter- and intra-communication for control loops will be presented. The relation between communication in control loops and distributed benchmarking will be introduced and ongoing work on a self-adaptive distributed benchmarking application will be discussed. Next, an evaluation strategy will be presented to provide evidence for viable results to the community. Finally, a research roadmap to tackle the discussed challenges is presented.