Xin Li @ UCSC

Ph.D Candidate

Engineering 2, Room 211
Dept. Computer Engineering
Baskin School of Engineering
University of California, Santa Cruz

E-mail: xinli AT ucsc DOT edu
[Curriculum Vitae] [Resume]

 

I am currently a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Computer Engineering at University of California Santa Cruz. I am very fortune to work with my advisor, Dr. Chen Qian. Prior to studying at UC Santa Cruz, I spent three years in the Computer Science Ph.D program at University of Kentucky where I was a student member of Laboratory for Advanced Networking.

My research interests lie in computer networking, cloud computing, Internet of Things and cybersecurity.

Education

Doctor of Philosophy	09/2016 - 12/2018 Computer Engineering University of California, Santa Cruz Advisor: Dr. Chen Qian
	08/2013 - 08/2016 Computer Science University of Kentcuky Advisor: Dr. Chen Qian
Master of Science	09/2012 - 06/2013 Electrical Engineering University of California, Riverside
Bachelor of Engineering	09/2008 - 06/2012 Communication Engineering University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Projects

• GSC: An IoT Data Communication Framework for Authenticity and Integrity. [PDF] [PPT] [Poster]
  Design a novel framework aiming to ensure authenticity and integrity of end-to-end communications for emerging IoT applications. This work improves the signing/verifying throughput compared to state-of-art solutions.

  • Propose a fast signature scheme that supports verifying partial data with constant space consumption at both the signer and the verifier.
  • Design a budget-based sampling protocol to uniformly sample data among event-based data streams generated by IoT devices.
  • Conduct prototype performance evaluation involving two asymmetric encryption algorithms (RSA, DSA) and three message digest functions (MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256).

• APPLE: An NFV Orchestration Framework for Interference-free Policy Enforcement. [PDF] [PPT] [Poster]
  Propose a novel and effecient virtual network function placement algorithm to enforce network policies without interfering other network control applications. By leveraging a light-weight virtual network function framework, ClickOS, the system is able to react quickly to traffic dynamics.

  • Formulate the virtual network function placement problem as an integer linear optimization problem.
  • Reduce the forwarding table entries by mimicking virtual circuit switching.
  • Build prototype by integrating OpenStack, Opendaylight, openVswitch and ClickOS.

• NETMAP: Traffic and Failure Aware VM Placement for Multi-tenant IaaS Cloud. [PDF] [PPT]
  Propose a new tenant networking abstraction model in multi-tenant clouds and associated virtual machine placement algorithm which optimizes the network bandwidth usage under the reliability requirements from tenants.

  • Propose an easy tenant networking abstraction model that roughly reflects the traffic pattern among VMs by analyzing real traffic traces from one cloud provider.
  • Define the problem as a mix integer quadratic optimization problem and identify its NP-hardness.
  • Propose a fast heuristic which yields better objective value than alternatives.

• Myopia: Low-Complexity Multi-Resource Packet Scheduling for Network Functions Virtualization. [PDF] [PPT]
  Design a low-complexity packet scheduling algorithm for fair multi-resource sharing among traffic. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is achieved by leveraging the power law distribution of flow size: Precise fair scheduling is only strictly enforced among elephant flows. Elephant flows are identified through the shielded count-min sketch. Mice flows are processed in FIFO fashion. Mice flows always have highe priority than elephant flows.

  • Validate the power law distribution of flow size by analyzing real traces.
  • Analyse the fairness among traffic flows as well as the theoretical maximum delay to process a packet.
  • Build a prototype using Click and conduct simulation experiments in NS3.

• DCM: Distributed and Collaborative Traffic Monitoring in Software Defined Networks. [PDF] [PPT]
  Study on a new collaborative distributed monitor scheme which load balances the monitoring tasks by taking the advantage of the global information gained by the central controller. Each switch is installed a novel two-stage Bloom filter to define the monitor tasks in data plane: The first stage is used to identify the set of flows to be monitored in the switch and the second stage indicates the specific monitoring tasks to take.

  • Identify the problem on assigning monitoring tasks to dierent switches such that the overall false positive rate is minimized is NP-hard.
  • Propose two heuristics to minimize the false positive rate of the two-stage Bloom filter: One complex oine heuristic optimizes the task assignment periodically and one fast online heuristic accommodates new requests.

• VIPLink: A user-friendly traffic mangement tool based on SDN.
  Implement and test an SDN application that allows the users through WebUI or RESTful APIs to establish, destroy and manage high-speed links in the campus network of University of Kentucky, which consists of both legency and SDN switches.

  • Implement the application in both foodlight and HP VAN versions, both of which expose RESTful APIs to the users.
  • Build the testbed in GENI.

Publications

• Privacy-preserving Cross-domain Routing Optimization - A Cryptographic Approach
  Qingjun Chen, Shouqian Shi, Xin Li, Chen Qian, Sheng Zhong
  IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) 2018
  [PDF] [BibTex]
  
• Towards Replay-resilient RFID Authentication
  Ge Wang, Haofan Cai, Chen Qian, Jinsong Han, Xin Li, Han Ding, Jizhong Zhao
  ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'18), New delhi, India, October 2018
  [PDF] [BibTex]
  
• SDLB: A Scalable and Dynamic Software Load Balancer for Fog and Mobile Edge Computing
  Ye Yu, Xin Li, Chen Qian
  ACM SIGCOMM 2017 Workshop on Mobile Edge Communications (MECOMM'17), Los Angles, USA, August 2017
  [PDF] [BibTex]
  
• Pronto: Efficient Test Packet Generation for Dynamic Network Data Planes
  Yu Zhao, Huazhe Wang, Xin Li, Yingying Yu, Chen Qian
  IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'17), Atlanta, USA, June 2017
  [PDF] [BibTex]
  
• An IoT Data Communication Framework for Authenticity and Integrity
  Xin Li, Huazhe Wang, Ye Yu, Chen Qian
  ACM/IEEE 2nd International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI'17), Pittsburg, USA, April 2017
  [PDF] [BibTex] [PPT]
  
  
• An NFV Orchestration Framework for Interference-free Policy Enforcement
  Xin Li, Chen Qian
  IEEE 36th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'16), Nara, Japan, July 2016
  [PDF] [BibTex] [PPT]
  
  
• A Survey of Network Function Placement
  Xin Li, Chen Qian
  IEEE 13th Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC'16), Las Vegas, USA, January 2016
  [PDF] [BibTex] [PPT]
  
  
• Traffic and Failure Aware VM Placement for Multi-tenant IaaS Cloud
  Xin Li, Chen Qian
  ACM/IEEE 23rd International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS'2015), Porland, USA, June 2015
  [PDF] [BibTex] [PPT]
  
  
• Low-Complexity Multi-Resource Packet Scheduling for Network Functions Virtualization
  Xin Li, Chen Qian
  2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'15), Hongkong, China, April 2015
  [PDF] [BibTex] [PPT]
  
  
• The Virtual Network Function Placement Problem
  Xin Li, Chen Qian
  2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS'15), Hongkong, China, April 2015
  [PDF] [BibTex]
  
• Distributed Collaborative Monitoring in Software Defined Networks
  Ye Yu, Chen Qian, Xin Li
  ACM 3rd workshop on Hot topics in software defined networking (HotSDN'14), Chicago, USA, August 2014
  [PDF] [BibTex] [PPT]
  
  

Teaching

CE252A Computer Networks	Fall 2017
CE253 Network Security	Spring 2017
CE110 Computer Architecture	Fall 2016
CS216 Introduction to Software Engineering	Fall 2015
CS216 Introduction to Software Engineering	Fall 2014
CS216 Introduction to Software Engineering	Spring 2014
CS216 Introduction to Software Engineering	Fall 2013

Honors

Student Travel Grant, IEEE ICNP	2017-2018
Disertation-Year Fellowship	2017-2018
Student Travel Grant, IEEE S&P	2016-2017
Student Travel Grant, CPSWeek	2016-2017
Student Travel Grant, ACM SOSR	2016-2017
Student Travel Grant, IEEE ICDCS	2015-2016
Student Travel Grant, IEEE INFOCOM	2014-2015
Dean’s Distinguish Fellowship	2012-2013
Best Graduation Thesis	2011-2012
MediaTek Scholarship	2010-2011
National Scholarship	2009-2010