Wireless and Networking research group (Microsoft Research Asia)

Data center networking (DCN) is a crucial part to support efficient operations of online services in the cloud. We investigate paradigm-shifting technologies to build high availability, high reliability and high-performance network fabric for our data centers.

Current Projects:

• Cloud-scale Network Function Virtualization
• Programming Reconfigurable Hardware for Virtualized Network Functions (more)
  • Checkout our ClickNP paper in SIGCOMM 2016!
• Multi-path transport protocols for data center networks (more)
  • Checkout our FUSO paper in ATC 2016!

Past Projects:

• Multicast and low-latency routing: Datacast (opens in new tab) (CoNEXT’12), RDB (opens in new tab) (CoNEXT’13)
• Congestion control: ICTCP (opens in new tab) (CoNEXT’10 – Best Paper), ECN* (opens in new tab) (CoNEXT’12)
• Network management: Address Configuration (opens in new tab) (SIGCOMM’10)
• Virtualization: SecondNet (opens in new tab) (CoNEXT’10), ServerSwitch (opens in new tab) (NSDI’11 – Awarded Best Paper)
• Our pioneer work in DCN, on network architecture: DCell (opens in new tab) (SIGCOMM’08), BCube (opens in new tab) (SIGCOMM’09)

FPGA for the cloud — empowering the cloud with reconfigurable hardware

We foresee that the re-configurability and high parallelism of FPGA will fundamentally change the way we are serving online services. We are investigating the cutting-edge technologies for better programming FPGAs and empowering our services in the cloud. We have demonstrated that using FPGA can significantly accelerate Deep Neural Networks in the cloud.

Current Projects:

• Going Deeper with FPGA (more)
  • Checkout our FPGA ’16 paper on Angel-Eye!

Software radio — empowering wireless revolution with the magic of software

We foresee that the increasingly powerful multi-core architecture and parallel data processing will fundamentally change wireless communications. Software-based cognitive wireless systems will become much more powerful, flexible, and efficient compared with existing wireless technologies. The enabling technology is software radio (or software-defined radio, SDR). For the past several years, we have strike to build the best software radio in a very different way, and to develop programming models and tools that will greatly reduce the effort involved in implementing state-of-the-art wireless systems.

• Publication: Sora (opens in new tab) (NSDI’09 – Best Paper, CACM version (opens in new tab))
• Sora is open-source at GitHub (opens in new tab).

Wireless Networks — computational thinking in the traditional field

The explosive increase in mobile usage demands constant revolutions in wireless technology. We have been engaged in a broad range of wireless research in PHY, MAC, cross-layer, MIMO, dynamic spectrum, whitespace, measurement, reliability, etc. Our approach has been one with “computational wireless” — applying computer science methodology in a very traditional field.

Current Projects:

• MIMO Systems
  • Checkout SmartHub paper at HotNets 2015
  • BigStation at SIGCOMM 2013
• Networking at 60GHz

Past Projects:

• Software-Defined WLAN: TDMA in WLAN (opens in new tab)(INFOCOM’15)
• MAC and PHY: Pilotfish  (opens in new tab)(MobiHoc’15), uACKs (opens in new tab) (MobiCom’12), Fine-grained Channel Access (opens in new tab) (SIGCOMM’10), Retransmission (opens in new tab) (MobiCom’10), SAM (opens in new tab) (MobiCom’09)
• DSA & Whitespace: Spectrum Virtualization (DySPAN’12)
• Video/visual: ParCast (opens in new tab) (MobiCom’12), QuickSync (opens in new tab) (MobiCom’13)

Mobile Systems — connecting people, devices, and information

Our mobile systems research covers exploring new paradigms and system mechanisms, and bringing mobile devices and the Cloud together to further improve a user’s mobile experience, and to enable a spectrum of new mobile applications that harness the power of the Cloud.

Current Projects:

• Smart and Secure Home Router.
  • Checkout our paper in APSys 2016

Past Projects:

• Localizations: Pixel (opens in new tab) (Mobisys’15) IODetector (opens in new tab) (SenSys’12), Walkie-Markie (opens in new tab) (NSDI’13), Epsilon (opens in new tab) (NSDI’14).
• Power efficiency: DozyAP (opens in new tab) – tethering (MobiSys’12), V-edge (opens in new tab) – power modelling (NSDI’13), Email Sync (opens in new tab) (MobiSys’13)
• mobile hardware: MusicalHeart (opens in new tab) (SenSys’12), Auditeur (opens in new tab) (MobiSys’13), ViRi (opens in new tab) (MobiSys’13)
• Sensing people: Mood Sensor (opens in new tab) (MobiSys’13)
• Mobile collaborations: Mobius (opens in new tab) (MobiSys’07), BeepBeep (opens in new tab) (SenSys’07), Point&Connect (opens in new tab) (MobiSys’09)
• OS and chips: xShare (opens in new tab) (MobiSys’09), Micro Wireless Interconnect (opens in new tab) (MobiCom’09)