Education

Ph.D.: University of Maryland, College Park, Dept. of Computer Science, 1983.

M.S.: University of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, 1981.

Masters in Engineering: Indian Institute of Science, School of Automation, Bangalore, India, 1978.

Bachelors in Electronics Engineering: Bangalore University, Bangalore, India, 1976.

Awards

ACM Fellow, 2017, recognized “for contributions to congestion control, operating system support for networks and virtual private networks”.

IEEE Fellow 2005, "for contributions to congestion control and traffic management in communication networks".

AT&T Fellow 2006, for "fundamental contributions to communications networks with lasting impact on AT&T and the industry, including congestion control, traffic management and VPN services".

ACM Sigcomm Test of Time Paper Award in 2006: Our paper on the "DECbit" congestion avoidance protocol "A Binary Feedback Scheme for Congestion Avoidance in Computer Networks with a Connectionless Network Layer" published in the Proceedings of the ACM Sigcomm 1988 (see the web page: http://www.sigcomm.org/awards/test-of-time-paper-award ).

AT&T Strategic Patent Award 2003, in recognition of a patent significantly contributing to AT&T's business.

AT&T Science and Technology Medal 2012, for "innovation and leadership in evaluation of mobile video delivery optimizations techniques."

Best Paper Awards:

Murat Yuksel, K. K. Ramakrishnan and Robert Doverspike, “Cross-Layer Failure Restoration Techniques to provide a Robust IPTV Service”, Proceedings of IEEE LANMAN 2008, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, September 2008 (Best Paper Award)

Mayutan Arumaithurai, Jiachen Chen, Edo Monticelli, Xiaoming Fu and K. K. Ramakrishnan, “Exploiting ICN for Flexible Management of Software-Defined Networks”, Proc. of 1st ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2014). (Best Paper Award)

Melissa Duarte, Ashutosh Sabharwal, Vaneet Aggarwal, Rittwik Jana, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Christopher Rice, N. K. Shankaranarayanan, “Design and Characterization of a Full-duplex Multi-antenna System for WiFi networks”, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2013. (Recipient of the 2017 Jack Neubauer Memorial Award recognizing the Best Systems Paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology)

Ahmed Zahran, Jason Quinlan, Cormac Sreenan, K. K. Ramakrishnan, “SAP: Stall-Aware Pacing for Improved DASH Video Experience in Cellular Networks”, Proc. of 8th ACM Conference on Multimedia Systems, June 2017 (Recipient of DASH Industry Forum’s Excellence in DASH 1st Prize: https://github.com/Dash-Industry-Forum/Academic-Track/wiki/results)

Jeffrey Erman, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Rittwik Jana, K. K. Ramakrishnan, “Towards a SPDY’ier Mobile Web?”, Proc. of CoNext 2013, Dec. 2013 (best paper runner up).

Best Demo Awards:

Jason Quinlan, Darijo Raca, Ahmed Zahran, Ahmed Khalid, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Cormac Sreenan, “D-LITE: A platform for evaluating DASH performance over a simulated LTE network”, Demo, IEEE LANMAN 2016 Symposium, Rome, Italy, June 2016. (Best Demo Award)

M. Jahanian, Y. Xing, J. Chen, K. K. Ramakrishnan, H. Seferoglu and M. Yuksel, "The Evolving Nature of Disaster Management in the Internet and Social Media Era," 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Local and Metropolitan Area Networks (LANMAN), June 2018. (Best Demo Award)

Research Projects

Our research group is involved in a number of projects funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Defense, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), HP Labs - HPE, and Huawei Inc.

Select Projects:

1. Our NSF grant provides continued support for OpenNetVM that has been jointly developed by our group at the University of California Riverside and Tim Wood's group at George Washington University. Network Function Virtualization is a "disruptive" technology that changes networks to a software-defined infrastructure offering flexible services with network functions supported by software containers. OpenNetVM is an open source software platform that seeks to lower the barrier for researchers wishing to explore challenges in this area, and for developers wishing to evaluate new types of network services. OpenNetVM is an open-source platform that we encourage others to adopt and contribute to.

2. Our grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) supports our work on “Modeling and Development of Resilient Communication”. I lead a team that includes PIs from University of Central Florida, University of Illinois, Chicago and Rutgers University. This project (see Project Description) seeks to model and develop resilient communication for first responders in disaster management. This work is funded by NIST's Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program. Refer to the project web page for recent progress.

3. We also have a related NSF grant that addresses the important role of social media and volunteers during and in the aftermath of disasters. This project will enhance communication frameworks with the use of social networks for hyper-local assistance from first responders and volunteers, keeping in mind security and trust.

4. Another NSF grant provides support for our IoT Nets: Networking for the Internet of Things project. We focus on developing innovative, efficient and scalable solutions to support large-scale IoT communication, including support for large-scale IoT communication over cellular networks, transport protocols, security, and integration of IoT solutions with Machine Learning.

5. We have received a grant from NSF for Mobile Elastic Edge Clouds for Scalable, Low-Latency Services that will explore the communication and system architectures needed to effectively support edge cloud services. Our project will develop mobile elastic edge cloud platform to help improve the scalability, agility, and efficiency of edge clouds, allowing them to support new types of performance critical applications.

Teaching

I teach undergraduate and graduate courses focused on Networking, Virtualization & Cloud Computing.

• CS 164: Introduction to Computer Networks (undergraduate)
• CS 204: Advanced Computer Networks (graduate)
• CS 208: Cloud Computing and Cloud Networking (graduate)
• CS 260: Seminar on Advanced Topics in Networking (graduate)

Publications (selected)

1. Sameer G Kulkarni, Guyue Liu, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Mayutan Arumaithurai, Timothy Wood, and Xiaoming Fu. 2018. REINFORCE: achieving efficient failure resiliency for network function virtualization based services. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT '18).
2. Y. T. Woldeyohannes, A. Mohammadkhan, K. K. Ramakrishnan and Y. Jiang, "ClusPR: Balancing Multiple Objectives at Scale for NFV Resource Allocation," in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 1307-1321, Dec. 2018.
3. A. Lara, S. Mukherjee, B. Ramamurthy, D. Raychaudhuri and K. K. Ramakrishnan, "Automated Inter-Domain Cut-Through Switching for the Future Internet," in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 1393-1406, Dec. 2018.
4. Guyue Liu, Yuxin Ren, Mykola Yurchenko, K. K. Ramakrishnan, and Timothy Wood. 2018. Microboxes: high performance NFV with customizable, asynchronous TCP stacks and dynamic subscriptions. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM '18).
5. L. Zhou, C. Chou, L. N. Bhuyan, K. K. Ramakrishnan and D. Wong, "Joint Server and Network Energy Saving in Data Centers for Latency-Sensitive Applications," 2018 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), Vancouver, BC, 2018.
6. E. Liri, P. K. Singh, A. B. Rabiah, K. Kar, K. Makhijani and K. K. Ramakrishnan, "Robustness of IoT Application Protocols to Network Impairments," 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Local and Metropolitan Area Networks (LANMAN), Washington, DC, USA, 2018.
7. M. Jahanian, Y. Xing, J. Chen, K. K. Ramakrishnan, H. Seferoglu and M. Yuksel, "The Evolving Nature of Disaster Management in the Internet and Social Media Era," 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Local and Metropolitan Area Networks (LANMAN), Washington, DC, USA, 2018.
8. Abdulrahman BIN Rabiah, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Elizabeth Liri, Koushik Kar, “A Lightweight Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol for IoT”, Proceedings of Workshop on Decentralized IoT Security and Standards, (Part of NDSS Symposium, 2018), Feb. 2018.
9. Ahmed H. Zahran, Jason J. Quinlan, K. K. Ramakrishnan, and Cormac J. Sreenan. 2018. ASAP: Adaptive Stall-Aware Pacing for Improved DASH Video Experience in Cellular Networks. ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications 14(3s), Article 61 (June 2018).
10. Bhandari, R., Raman, B., Ramakrishnan, K.K., Chander, D., Aggarwal, N., Bansal, D., Choudhary, M., Moond, N., Bansal, A., Chaudhary, M., “CrowdLoc: Cellular Fingerprinting for Crowds by Crowds”, ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks. Vol. 14: 1 p.4:1--4:36, Jan. 2018.
11. Tian Guo, Prashant Shenoy, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, “Latency-aware virtual desktops optimization in distributed clouds”, Multimedia Systems, Springer, Jan. 2018.
12. Sameer Kulkarni, Wei Zhang, Jinho Hwang, Shriram Rajagopalan, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Timothy Wood, Mayutan Arumaithurai, Xiaoming Fu, “NFVnice: Dynamic Backpressure and Scheduling for NFV Service Chains”, Proc. of ACM Sigcomm 2017 conference, Aug. 2017.
13. Guyue Liu, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Mike Schlansker, Jean Tourrilhes, Timothy Wood, “Design Challenges for High Performance Scalable NFV Interconnects”, Proc. of ACM Sigcomm 2017 Workshop on Kernel-Bypass Networks, Aug. 2017.
14. Aditya Dhakal, K. K. Ramakrishnan, “Machine Learning at the Network Edge for Automated Home Intrusion Monitoring”, Workshop on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Computer Networks (ML&AI @ Network), ICNP 2017.
15. Shahryar Afzal, Jiasi Chen, K.K. Ramakrishnan, "Characterization of 360-degree videos", ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality Network, 2017.
16. Wei Zhang, Jinho Hwang, Shriram Rajagopalan, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Timothy Wood, “Flurries: Countless Fine-Grained NFs for Flexible Per-Flow Customization”, Proceedings of ACM CoNext’16, Dec. 2016.
17. Ali Mohammadkhan, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Ashok Sunder Rajan, Christian Maciocco, “CleanG: A Clean-Slate EPC Architecture and Control Plane Protocol for Next Generation Cellular Networks”, Proc. of Cloud-Assisted Networking 2016 Workshop at ACM CoNext’16, Dec. 2016 (Invited).
18. Wei Zhang, Guyue Liu, Ali Mohammadkhan, Jinho Hwang, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Timothy Wood, “SDNFV: Flexible and Dynamic Software Defined Control of an Application- and Flow-Aware Data Plane”, ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware 2016, Dec. 2016.
19. Jiachen Chen, Mayutan Arumaithurai, Xiaoming Fu, K. K. Ramakrishnan, “CNS: Content-oriented Notification Service for Managing Disasters”, Proceedings of 3rd ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2016), Kyoto, Japan, Sept. 2016.
20. Wei Zhang, Guyue Liu, Wenhui Zhang, Neel Shah, Phil Lopreiato, Gregoire Todeschi, K.K. Ramakrishnan, Timothy Wood, “OpenNetVM: A Platform for High Performance Network Service Chains”, Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization, Aug. 2016.
21. Ming Zhu, Dan Li, Fangxin Wang, Anke Li, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Ying Liu, Jianping Wu, Nan Zhu, Xue Liu, “CCDN: Content-Centric Data Center Networks”, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 24, Issue 4, Aug. 2016.
22. David Applegate, Aaron Archer, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Seungjoon Lee and K. K. Ramakrishnan, “Optimal Content Placement for a Large-Scale VoD System”, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 24, Issue 4, Aug. 2016.
23. Wei Dong, Swati Rallapalli, Lili Qiu, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Yin Zhang, “Double Auctions for Dynamic Spectrum Allocation”, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 24, Issue 4, Aug. 2016.
24. Sripriya Adhatarao, Jiachen Chen, Mayutan Arumaithurai, Xiaoming Fu, K. K. Ramakrishnan, “Comparison of Naming Schema in ICN”, Proc. IEEE LANMAN 2016 Symposium, Rome, Italy, June 2016.
25. Kyung-Wook Hwang, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Rittwik Jana, Seungjoon Lee, Vishal Misra, K. K. Ramakrishnan and Dan Rubenstein, “Joint-Family: Adaptive BitRate Video-on-Demand Streaming over Peer-to-Peer Networks with Realistic Abandonment Patterns”, Computer Networks, Elsevier, June 2016.
26. Jeffrey Erman, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Rittwik Jana, K. K. Ramakrishnan, “Towards a SPDY’ier Mobile Web?”, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Volume 23 Issue 6, pp. 2010-2023, Dec. 2015.
27. Timothy Wood, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Jinho Hwang, Grace Liu, and Wei Zhang, “Towards a Software-Based Network: Integrating Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization”, Special issue of IEEE Network Magazine on Network Function Virtualization: Opportunities and Challenges, 2015.
28. Ali Mohammadkhan, Guyue Liu, Wei Zhang, K. K. Ramakrishnan and Timothy Wood, “Protocols to Support Autonomy and Control for NFV in Software Defined Networks”, Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization & Software Defined Networks (IEEE NFV-SDN), San Francisco, CA, Nov. 18-21, 2015.
29. Ali Mohammadkhan, Sheida Ghapani, Guyue Liu, Wei Zhang, K. K. Ramakrishnan and Timothy Wood, “Virtual Function Placement and Traffic Steering in Flexible and Dynamic Software Defined Networks”, Proc. IEEE LANMAN 2015 Workshop, Beijing, China, April 2015.
30. Jiasi Chen, Mung Chiang, Jeffrey J Erman, Guangzhi Li, K. K. Ramakrishnan Rakesh K Sinha, “Fair and Optimal Resource Allocation for LTE Multicast (eMBMS): Group Partitioning and Dynamics,” Proc. of IEEE Infocom 2015.
31. Wei Dong, Swati Rallapalli, Rittwik Jana, Lili Qiu, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Leonid V. Razoumov, Yin Zhang, Tae Won Cho, 'iDEAL: Incentivized Cellular Offloading via Auctions', IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Aug. 2014.
32. Mayutan Arumaithurai, Jiachen Chen, Edo Monticelli, Xiaoming Fu and K. K. Ramakrishnan, 'Exploiting ICN for Flexible Management of Software-Defined Networks, Proc. of 1st ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2014). (Best Paper Award)
33. Jinho Hwang, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Timothy Wood, 'NetVM: High Performance and Flexible Networking Using Virtualization on Commodity Platforms', Proceedings of USENIX NSDI 2014.
34. Jeffrey Erman, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Rittwik Jana, K. K. Ramakrishnan, 'Towards a SPDY'ier Mobile Web?', Proc. of ACM CoNext 2013, Dec. 2013. (Best Paper runner-up)
35. Murat Yuksel, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, Joseph D. Houle, Rita Sadhvani, 'Required Extra Capacity: A Comparative Estimation of Overprovisioning Needed for a Classless IP Backbone', Computer Networks, Elsevier Science, November 2012.
36. V. Sharma, K. Kar, K. K. Ramakrishnan and S. Kalyanaraman, 'A Transport Protocol Exploiting Multipath Diversity in Wireless Networks', IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking, August 2012.
37. Tim Wood, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Jacobus Van der Merwe, Prashant Shenoy, 'Enterprise-Ready Virtual Cloud Pools: Vision, Opportunities, and Challenges', The Computer Journal, Oxford Journals, 2012.
38. Tim Wood, Andres Horacio Lagar, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Jacobus Van der Merwe, Prashant Shenoy, 'PipeCloud: Using Causality to Overcome Speed-of-Light Delays in Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery', ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC 2011), Oct. 2011.
39. J. Chen, M. Arumaithurai, L. Jiao, X. Fu, K. K. Ramakrishnan, COPSS: An Efficient Content Oriented Publish/Subscribe System, ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS), 2011.
40. N.G. Duffield, P. Goyal, A. Greenberg, P. Mishra, K. K. Ramakrishnan, and J. E. Van der Merwe, 'A Flexible Model for Resource Management in Virtual Private Networks', IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Oct. 2002.
41. J. C. Mogul and K. K. Ramakrishnan, "Eliminating Receive Livelock in an Interrupt-driven Kernel", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Oct. 1997.
42. K.K. Ramakrishnan, Raj Jain, "A Binary Feedback Scheme for Congestion Avoidance in Computer Networks", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, May 1990.
43. K. K. Ramakrishnan, `Performance Considerations in Designing Network Interfaces', IEEE Journal on Special Areas in Communications, Special issue on Network Interfaces, Feb. 1993.
44. K.K. Ramakrishnan, Joel Emer, "Performance Analysis of Mass Storage Service Alternatives for Distributed Systems", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, February 1989.