Prof. K. K. Ramakrishnan's Research Lab.

Latest News

• Paper by Federico, Shixiong and Anvaya published in SOCC 2024

  Paper by Federico, Shixiong and Anvaya published in SOCC 2024

• Paper by Hongmiao, Shaoyu and others accepted for IEEE MILCOM 2024

  Paper by Hongmiao, Shaoyu (Kevin) and others accepted for IEEE MILCOM 2024

• Shixiong successfully defended his PhD Defense. Congrats Dr. Qi!

  Commencement 2024, PhD Hooding Ceremony: Dr. Qi, Dr. Ramakrishnan, Dr, Liri.

  
• K. K. Ramakrishnan winner of 2024 ACM SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Contribution

  It is with great happiness and humility that I convey the news that the ACM Sigcomm Awards committee chose me for the annual ACM SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Contributions. I'm very honored and grateful for being chosen this year. The announcement can be seen on the ACM Sigcomm web site.

• Shixiong will be joining the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky in fall 2024 as an assistant professor. Congrats Shixiong!

  Shixiong will be joining the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky in fall 2024 as an assistant professor. Congrats Shixiong!

• Paper by Anvaya, Federico and others accepted for IEEE LANMAN 2024

  Paper by Anvaya, Federico and others accepted for IEEE LANMAN 2024

• Paper by Shixiong and others accepted for IEEE Internet Computing

   Paper by Shixiong and others accepted for IEEE Internet Computing:

  "L26GC: Evolving the Low Latency Core for Future Cellular Networks"

  Abstract—With the deployment of higher-speed radio (e.g., millimeter wave) channels, emerging cellular use cases will place a heightened emphasis on performance of the cellular core (we call it ‘6GC’). Based on our earlier work on designing a low-latency, high-throughput 5G cellular core, we outline a design for L26GC, a 6G cellular core preserving the current trend to disaggregate core network functions (NFs) while ensuring low-latency communication between them. L26GC leverages shared memory processing for low-latency control plane communication, providing an equivalent service to the 3GPP Service Based Interface (SBI), and supports information exchange between NFs for each user session. L26GC offloads data plane processing to SmartNICs, exploiting scalable, flow-level packet classifiers to expedite forwarding-rule lookups when dealing with multiple user sessions. Overall, L26GC optimizes the cellular core, improving latency, scalability, and the user’s quality of experience.

• Paper by Shixiong and others accepted for MLSys 2024

  Please visit this link for the paper.

• Our team led by AT&T, Verizon and others has been selected by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for the $42 million grant to support the development of open and interoperable wireless networks!

  We are really pleased that our team led by AT&T, Verizon and others has been selected by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for the $42 million grant to support the development of open and interoperable wireless networks. We are glad to be joining the Acceleration of Compatibility and Commercialization for Open RAN Deployments (ACCoRD) consortium that will conduct testing, evaluation and certification of O-RAN equipment.

  We are looking forward to collaborating on this exciting National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) project with Tracy Van Brakle, Ivan Seskar and the rest of the team at AT&T, Verizon, Rutgers University, NYU WIRELESS, Columbia Engineering and several partner organizations. UCR will be providing a unique test environment for ACCoRD, testing higher layer protocols and applications. This will build on our long-standing collaboration with AT&T, Rutgers WINLAB and others on the US NSF supported research on Track G: Securely Operating Through 5G Infrastructure to advance 5G communications for the U.S. government and critical infrastructure operators.

• Prof. K. K. has been invited to serve as IEEE MASS’24 General Co-Chair. Please consider submitting!

  Prof. K. K. has been invited to serve as IEEE MASS’24 General Co-Chair. Please consider submitting!

• Paper by Shixiong and others accepted for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

  Paper by Shixiong and others accepted for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

• Prof. K. K. was selected as one of the Indian Institute of Science Distinguished Alumni for the Year 2023 and the ceremony was held on Dec. 2, 2023.

  The link to the announcement is: "IISc announces Distinguished Alumni Awards 2023".

  There were several news articles regarding this in newspapers in India. Some of the links are:

  Deccan Herald: "IISc to honour 5 distinguished alumni for 2023"

  The Hindu: "IISc announces distinguished alumni awards for 2023"

  The Economic Times: "Ex-Infoscion, ISRO Chairman among five chosen for IISc's Distinguished Alumni Awards"

• Dr. Elizabeth Liri will join the Department of Computer Science at Saint Louis University as a PostDoc. Congrats Dr. Liri!

  Dr. Elizabeth Liri will join the Department of Computer Science at Saint Louis University as a PostDoc. Congrats Dr. Liri!

• Elizabeth successfully defended her PhD Defense. Congrats Dr. Liri!

  Elizabeth successfully defended her PhD Defense. Congrats Dr. Liri!

• Paper by Hongmiao and others accepted for IEEE ICNP 2023

  Paper by Hongmiao and others accepted for IEEE ICNP 2023

• Paper by Shixiong and others accepted for IEEE CloudNet 2023

  In this work, we develop L²5GC+. L²5GC+ is a re-architected 5G Core (5GC) network, aimed at reducing latency and improving user experience. L²5GC+ focuses on minimizing the impact of control plane operations on the data plane, while also enhancing data plane processing. It achieves this by exploiting shared memory (based on OpenNetVM), eliminating message serialization and HTTP processing overheads in 3GPP SBI, and using scalable packet classifiers for forwarding-rule lookups. L²5GC+ re-designs OpenNetVM's shared-memory-based networking stack to support synchronous I/O between control plane functions, which allows it to distinguish different user sessions and maintains strict 3GPP compliance. L²5GC+ also offers seamless integration with existing 5GC microservice implementations through equivalent SBI APIs, reducing code refactoring and porting efforts. Additionally, L²5GC+ implements paging and an intelligent handover scheme to reduce delays and data loss. It also offers integrated failure resiliency for faster recovery from failures compared to standard 3GPP procedures.

  L²5GC+ is built on the open-source kernel-based 5GC implementation called free5GC. By leveraging shared memory I/O, L²5GC+ optimizes the 5G control plane, enhancing latency, scalability, and overall user experience. L²5GC+ achieves 2X lower data plane latency for paging and handover events compared to free5GC. We demonstrate the improved performance of L²5GC+ on a 5G testbed with commercial basestations and UEs. The code of L²5GC+ is open-sourced at: https://github.com/nycu-ucr/L25GC-plus.git.

• Paper by Shixiong and others accepted for IEEE NetSoft 2023

  Paper by Shixiong and others accepted for IEEE NetSoft 2023

• Sourav successfully defended his PhD Defense. Congrats Dr. Panda!

  Sourav successfully defended his PhD Defense. Congrats Dr. Panda!

• Paper by Shixiong and others accepted for IEEE TNSM (2023)

  Paper "MiddleNet: A Unified, High-Performance NFV and Middlebox Framework with eBPF and DPDK" by Shixiong and others accepted for IEEE TNSM. 

   

• Paper by Elizabeth Liri and others accepted for IEEE Network

   Paper "Energy-Efficient Distributed Task Scheduling for Multi-Sensor IoT Networks" by Elizabeth Liri and others accepted for IEEE Network (To appear in March/April issue)

• Paper by Elizabeth Liri and others accepted for ICDCN 2023.

  Paper "An Efficient Energy Management Solution for Renewable Energy Based IoT Devices" by Elizabeth Liri and others accepted for ICDCN 2023.

• Paper by Aditya Dhakal and others accepted for ACM CoNext 2022.

  Paper by Aditya Dhakal and others accepted for ACM CoNext 2022.

• Paper by Aditya Dhakal and others accepted for ACM Middleware 2022.

  Paper by Aditya Dhakal and others accepted for ACM Middleware 2022.

• Paper by Sourav Panda and others published at IEEE ICNP 2022.

  Synergy: A SmartNIC Accelerated 5G Dataplane and Monitor for Mobility Prediction
  Sourav Panda, K. K. Ramakrishnan, and Laxmi Bhuyan (University of California, Riverside)

• Our group was recently awarded an NSF-JUNO3 grant, along with Tim Wood (GWU) and our Japanese collaborators

  Our group was recently awarded an NSF-JUNO3 grant, along with Tim Wood (GWU) and our Japanese collaborators

• Two papers by Shixiong, Vivek and others accepted for ACM Sigcomm 2022
  • Shixiong Qi, Leslie Monis, Ziteng Zeng, Ian-chin Wang, K. K. Ramakrishnan. 2022. SPRIGHT: Extracting the Server from Serverless Computing! High- performance eBPF-based Event-driven, Shared-memory Processing. In ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference (SIGCOMM ’22), August 22–26, 2022, Amsterdam, Netherlands. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544216.3544259
  • Vivek Jain, Hao-Tse Chu, Shixiong Qi, Chia-An Lee, Hung-Cheng Chang, Cheng-Ying Hsieh, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Jyh-Cheng Chen. 2022. L25GC: A Low Latency 5G Core Network based on High-Performance NFV Platforms. In ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference (SIGCOMM ’22), August 22– 26, 2022, Amsterdam, Netherlands. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544216.3544267
• Paper by Vivek, Sourav, and Shixiong won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE 6GNet 2022 Conference

  Vivek Jain, Sourav Panda, Shixiong Qi and K. K. Ramakrishnan, "Evolving to 6G: Improving the Cellular Core to lower control and data plane latency," 2022 1st International Conference on 6G Networking (6GNet), 2022, doi: 10.1109/6GNet54646.2022.9830519.