Wireless and Networking research group (Microsoft Research Asia)

The Wireless and Networking group at Microsoft Research Asia engages in fundamental research on all aspects of computer networking. Our group members’ research interests span cloud computing, datacenter networks, wireless, and mobile systems. We investigate new paradigms to build intelligent cloud infrastructure and networks. We emphasize both analytical and empirical approaches, and build running systems to validate theoretical results and refine system principles from experimental work.

  • Data Center Networking — building efficient and intelligent fabrics for millions of servers

    dcn 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 (CoNEXT’12), RDB (CoNEXT’13)
    • Congestion control: ICTCP (CoNEXT’10 – Best Paper), ECN* (CoNEXT’12)
    • Network management: Address Configuration (SIGCOMM’10)
    • Virtualization: SecondNet (CoNEXT’10), ServerSwitch (NSDI’11 – Awarded Best Paper)
    • Our pioneer work in DCN, on network architecture: DCell (SIGCOMM’08), BCube (SIGCOMM’09)

    FPGA for the cloud — empowering the cloud with reconfigurable hardware

    fpgaWe 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

    sora-logoWe 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.

    Wireless Networks — computational thinking in the traditional field

    wirelessThe 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:

    Mobile Systems — connecting people, devices, and information

    mobileOur 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:

    • Best Paper Award, NSDI’11 (ServerSwitch)
    • Best Paper Award, CoNEXT’10 (Incast)
    • Best Demo Award, SIGCOMM’10 (Sora/MPAP)
    • Best Paper Award, NSDI’09 (Sora)
    • Best Demo Award, NSDI’09 (Sora)
    • Best Demo Award, MobiSys’08 (P&C)
    • Best Demo Award, SenSys’07 (BeepBeep)
    • Best Demo Award, MobiSys’07 (Mobius)

 

People

Portrait of Peng Cheng

Peng Cheng

Principal Researcher

Portrait of Yongqiang Xiong

Yongqiang Xiong

Principal Researcher/Research Manager Networking Research Group, Microsoft Research Asia