Speaker Bio

Dr. Chenren Xu is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and a member of CECA at Peking University where he directs Software-hardware Orchestrated ARchitecture (SOAR) Lab since 2015. He earned his Ph.D. from WINLAB, Rutgers University, was a postdoctoral fellow in Carnegie Mellon University and visiting scholars in AT&T Shannon Labs and Microsoft Research. His research interests span wireless, networking and system, with a current focus on backscatter communication for low power IoT connectivity, future mobile Internet for high mobility data networking, and collaborative edge intelligence system for mobile and IoT computing. He is currently an associate editor of Proceedings of the ACM on IMWUT, and actively serving as organizing and/or technical program committee in SIGCOMM, SIGMOBILE and ComSoC conferences. He is the recipient of Alibaba DAMO Academy Young Fellow and CCF-Intel Young Faculty awards, and a senior member of IEEE and ACM.

Bridging the Gap between Networking and Transportation: from Retro-reflective Roadway to High-speed Railway

Abstract

The increasing mobility supported by today’s highway and high-speed railway infrastructure has significantly improved our short-to-medium transportation efficiency. However, such extreme high mobility also poses great challenges in providing ubiquitous and reliable connectivity between host vehicles and the rest of the world for driving safety, Internet access, etc. In this talk, I will introduce two examples of my research to address these challenges. First, I will present RetroI2V, a novel retroreflective infrastructure-to-vehicle communication and networking system that renovates conventional road signs to convey additional and dynamic information to vehicles while reduces the power and cost by 100x and 10x in comparison to current V2X solutions. Second, I will introduce Polycorn, a data-driven multipath transmission middleware solution that observes the sophisticated cross-layer interaction pattern between mobile and basestation and takes advantage of carrier diversity to optimize short flow latency. Experimental results from “Fuxing Hao” high-speed trains on the Beijing-Shanghai HSR route deployment show Polycorn can effectively benefit onboard passengers’ mobile experience. I will conclude the talk with future directions in extreme high mobility data networking research, both in terms of the core methods as well as applications.