IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecture

Talk Title: Research Roadmap Driven by Network Benchmarking Lab (NBL): Deep Packet Inspection, Traffic Forensics, WLAN/LTE, Embedded Benchmarking, Software Defined Networking, and Beyond 

Speaker: Ying-Dar Lin, IEEE Fellow, IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, ONF Research Associate and Distinguished Professor of National Chiao Tung University (Hsinchu, Taiwan)

Location: Room CO350, Cotton Building, Victoria University of Wellington (Kelburn Campus)

Time:  12:00 - 1:00 pm, Thursday 20th August

Abstract: Most researchers look for topics from the literature. But our research has been driven mostly by development which in turn has been driven by industrial projects or lab works. We first compare three different sources of research topics. We then derive two research tracks driven by product development and product testing, named as the blue track and the green track, respectively. Each track is further divided into development plane and research plane. The blue track on product development has fostered a startup company (L7 Networks Inc.) and a textbook (Computer Networks: An Open Source Approach, McGraw-Hill 2011) at the development plane and also a research roadmap on QoS and deep packet inspection (DPI) at the research plane. On the other hand, the green track on product testing has triggered a 3rd-party test bed, Network Benchmarking Lab (NBL, www.nbl.org.tw), at the development plane and a research roadmap on traffic forensics, WLAN/LTE, embedded benchmarking, and software defined networking at the research plane. Throughout this talk, we illustrate how development and research could be highly interleaved. At the end, we give lessons accumulated over the past decade. The audience could see how research could be conducted in a different way.

Seminar Outline:

1.     From development to research

2.     System research with three side products - NBL, L7 Networks Inc., textbook

3.     The blue track – product development

Development plane: L7 Networks Inc., textbook

Research plane: QoS, DPI (deep packet inspection)

4.     The green track – product testing

Development plane: NBL, EBL, BML

Research plane: traffic forensics, WLAN/LTE, embedded benchmarking, software defined networking

5.     Lessons learned

Autobiography:

YING-DAR LIN is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA in 1993. He served as the CEO of Telecom Technology Center in Taipei during 2010-2011 and a visiting scholar at Cisco Systems in San Jose during 2007–2008. Since 2002, he has been the founder and director of Network Benchmarking Lab (NBL, www.nbl.org.tw), which reviews network products with real traffic. NBL recently became an approved test lab of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). He also cofounded L7 Networks Inc. in 2002, which was later acquired by D-Link Corp. His research interests include design, analysis, implementation, and benchmarking of network protocols and algorithms, quality of services, network security, deep packet inspection, wireless communications, embedded hardware/software co-design, and recently software defined networking. His work on “multi-hop cellular” was the first along this line, and has been cited over 670 times and standardized into IEEE 802.11s, IEEE 802.15.5, WiMAX IEEE 802.16j, and 3GPP LTE-Advanced. He is an IEEE Fellow (class of 2013), an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer (2014&2015), and a Research Associate of ONF. He is currently on the Editorial Boards of IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Computer (Associate Editor-in-Chief), IEEE Network, IEEE Communications Magazine - Network Testing Series, IEEE Wireless Communications, IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, IEEE Communications Letters, Computer Communications, Computer Networks, Journal of Network and Computer Applications, and IEICE Transactions on Communications. He has guest edited several Special Issues in IEEE journals and magazines, and co-chaired symposia at IEEE Globecom’13 and IEEE ICC’15. He published a textbook, Computer Networks: An Open Source Approach (www.mhhe.com/lin), with Ren-Hung Hwang and Fred Baker (McGraw-Hill, 2011). It is the first text that interleaves open source implementation examples with protocol design descriptions to bridge the gap between design and implementation.