Research Statement for Xiaoming Fu

My main research interests are in the areas of communication network architectures, protocols, and applications, including system design, implementation and evaluation for computer networking, distributed systems and networked multimedia, with a focus on Quality of Service, signaling and reliability, performance evaluation and optimization, network security, mobile and wireless networking, application and system aspects for multimedia networking, and overlay and peer-to-peer networks.

Over the years, I have been extremely fortunate to be exposed to multiple projects and ideas from different researchers and collaborators at many institutions, would them of the academia or the industry from Germany, Europe or worldwide. Each of these experiences has either led to publications, standard specs and implementations, patents, and other forms of contributions to the community. These also resulted in a successfully secured funding for our networking research team currently comprising 1 postdoc,  about 6 Ph.D. students and several master students. The group is committed to high quality research with the aim of ensuring that our contributions remain relevant to the changing needs of the community.

Among these efforts I recently helped to define and setup the EC FP6 IST ENABLE and MING-T research projects, in which I am serving on the Project Steering Committees. I am also leading the Goettingen team in the EC EUREKA Celtic VIDIOS project (also on its Project Coordination Committee) and participating in the EC FP6 IST Daidalos (Phase II) project. I have also been responsible for research collaboration projects with Siemens Corporate Technology (PTLS) and Panasonic Princeton Laboratory (MobiAuth). The research can be roughly categorized into the following 5 themes:

• New architectures and platforms for large-scale networks and distributed systems, for instance the design and evaluation of a resilient overlay system (GONE) and experimentations with PLANET-LAB and XORP platforms, including their security implications and enhancements.
• Internet QoS and NAT/firewall middlebox control: in scope of a collaborative effort SIGNET we study the design, development and standardization of a new extensible network-layer signaling protocol suite after RSVP, including CASP/NSIS signaling protocols for QoS resource reservations and NAT/firewall middlebox traversal, among the others, and work closely related to IRTF EME RG. This effort has been also extended in the scope of ENABLE and VIDIOS projects.
• Internet multimedia. This includes (in VIDIOS) SIP/IMS and signaled edge-to-edge QoS for media streaming over (G)MPLS networks, a proposed DMMP overlay multicast framework (well - also related to IRTF SAM RG), and (in MING-T) the effort towards a converged network platform design which attempts to integrate the recent Chinese digital broadcast standard DTMB and the European DVB-H technologies with the scalable video coding techniques and mobile communication technologies such as mobile IP, WLAN and 3G.
• Internet mobility, autonomic communications and cross-layer design. For example, within ENABLE and Daidalos II, we aim to develop and validate architecture and solutions for IPv6 based mobility networks providing advanced authorization and bootstrapping services, middlebox traversal (such as flexible and dynamic configuration of firewalls) and resource control, multihoming and QoS support, as well as investigate emerging mobility management paradigms, towards the future generation mobile networks (B3G/4G).
• Formal methods and modeling for protocol design, validation and analysis: during the protocol design and development efforts of SIGNET, MobiAuth, Daidalos II and PTLS we encounter(ed) various issues in the spec flaws, undeterministic behaviors and security holes, hence we utilize formal tools such as SDL/MSC/UML/Casper to model the functional behaviors and to detect possible design flaws, deadlocks, or livelocks; to analyze performance and to optimize protocol parameters we use analytical, simulation and modeling tools such as queueing theory and Markovian chains, ns-2, OPNET and OMNeT++.  

While so far I devote my energy mostly to IP-based wired, wireless and mobile communication networks and networked multimedia research, I envision networked systems that integrate technologies of efficient, reliable, secure and sustainable communications and computing, and moreover serve as, in many cases, a building block that interacts with other technologies such as sensing, middleware, GRID, content, and more. I look forward to the open research issues (and opportunities!) towards the seamless co-existence, interoperability, emerging applications and future architectures of network technologies, and I am happy to identify and address issues in other related directions, from the operating systems support, to distributed systems design and and service enabling technologies.

Last updated: Dec 2006
fu@cs.uni-goettingen.de