Dr.-Ing. Zuo Xiang

PhD Researcher

Zuo Xiang received his Master degree (Diplom-Ingenieur) in electrical engineering with honors from the TU Dresden, Germany, in 2018. During his PhD study, his research focused on 5G network softwarization through NFV and SDN technologies. The title of his PhD dissertation is “Ultra Low-latency, Energy-efficient and Computing-centric Software Data Plane for Network Softwarization”. In addition to his solid research skills, he is experienced in designing and developing high-performance software systems for virtualized network functions (VNFs) and server-side applications. He also has experience in 5G core network system development and has in-depth knowledge of network system design, network protocol stacks, communication protocols and operating systems.

Contact

Email: zuo.xiang@tu-dresden.de
Phone: +49 351 463-42114
Office: Barkhausenbau, BAR/I9, Georg-Schumann-Straße 11, 01187 Dresden
Online Accounts: LinkedIn, GitHub

Research Interests

• Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN)

• Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC)

• Computing in the Network (COIN)

Publications

@inbook{CompBookChap13,

title = {ComNetsEmu: A Lightweight Emulator},

author = {Zuo {Xiang} and Juan A. {Cabrera} and Sreekrishna {Pandi} and Patrick {Seeling} and Frank H. P. {Fitzek}},

editor = {Frank H. P. {Fitzek} and Fabrizio {Granelli} and Patrick {Seeling}},

year  = {2020},

date = {2020-01-01},

urldate = {2020-01-01},

booktitle = {Computing in Communication Networks \textendash From Theory to Practice},

volume = {1},

pages = {257-268},

publisher = {Elsevier},

edition = {1},

chapter = {13},

series = {1},

note = {https://cn.ifn.et.tu-dresden.de/compcombook/},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inbook}

}

@article{Xian1803:Reducing,

title = {Reducing Latency in Virtual Machines Enabling Tactile Internet for Human Machine Co-working},

author = {Zuo {Xiang} and Frank {Gabriel} and Elena {Urbano} and Giang T. {Nguyen} and Martin {Reisslein} and Frank H. P. {Fitzek}},

doi = {10.1109/JSAC.2019.2906788},

issn = {0733-8716},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-05-01},

journal = {IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications},

volume = {37},

number = {5},

pages = {1098-1116},

address = {, USA},

abstract = {Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) processed in Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) cloud systems have been proposed as critical paradigms for achieving the low latency requirements of the tactile Internet. While virtual network functions (VNFs) allow greater flexibility compared to hardware based solutions, the VNF abstraction also introduces additional packet processing delays. In this paper, we investigate the practical feasibility of NFV with respect to the tactile Internet latency requirements. We develop, implement, and evaluate Chain bAsed Low latency VNF ImplemeNtation (CALVIN), a low-latency management framework for distributed Service Function Chains (SFCs). CALVIN classifies VNFs into elementary, basic, and advanced VNFs. CALVIN implements elementary and basic VNFs in the kernel space, while advanced VNFs are implemented in the user space. Throughout, CALVIN employs a distributed mapping with one VNF per Virtual Machine (VM) in a MEC system. Moreover, CALVIN avoids the metadata structure processing and batch processing of packets in the conventional Linux networking stack so as to achieve short per-packet latencies. Our rigorous measurements on off-the-shelf conventional networking and computing hardware demonstrate that CALVIN achieves round-trip times from a MEC ingress point via an elementary forwarding VNF and a MEC server to a MEC egress point on the order of 0.32~ms. Our measurements also indicate that MEC network coding and encryption are feasible for small 256 byte packets with an MEC latency budget of .35~ms; whereas, large 1400 byte packets can complete the network coding, but not the encryption within the 0.35~ms.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@inproceedings{Gabr1810:Latency,

title = {Latency Measurement of Service Function Chaining on OpenStack Platform},

author = {Zuo {Xiang} and Frank {Gabriel} and Giang T. {Nguyen} and Frank H. P. {Fitzek}},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-10-04},

booktitle = {2018 IEEE 43rd Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN) (LCN 2018)},

address = {Chicago, USA},

abstract = {Service Function Chaining allows the flexible and efficient deployment of 

network functions for different applications. With Network Function 

Virtualization the elements of the chain can be provisioned in virtual 

environments on any COTS hardware. This introduces the question of where to 

position the individual network functions within the virtualization 

environment. This problem of network function placement has been studied in 

theory as an optimization problem on a graph. However it is challenging to 

apply theoretical work on practical deployments. In this paper, we perform 

a measurement campaign to study the delay introduced by Service Function 

Chaining. We propose placement heuristics and evaluate the performance on 

OpenStack. With the proposed heuristics, the service delay can be reduced 

by more than 20%. We measured the overhead introduced by a network 

function implemented in user space. The processing delay in user space can 

be twice as much as the same function in kernel space. More interestingly, 

we identified a service interruption of more than 1 second after activation 

of the chain.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

Teaching

Lectures

• Communication Networks 2: SS2020
• Communication Networks 3: WS2019
• Practical Implementations of Network Coding: SS2018, SS2019
• Problem Based Learning: WS2019, WS2020

Supervision

Diplom/Master Thesis (DA/MA)

• Evaluation and Implementation of Adaptive Service Function Chaining Protocol for Latency Sensitive Object Detection (Renbing Zhang)
• Design and Evaluation of a Network Softwarization Platform for Edge and In-Network Computing (Patrick Ziegler)
• Fast Traffic Congestion Detection and Avoidance for Edge Data Center Network with modern Programmable Switches (Ulrich Baur)
• Routing algorithm design for Compression-And-Forward in Mesh Networks (Mohammad Kameli)
• Towards Energy-efficient and High-performance Packet Processing for Cloud-native Network Functions (CNFs) (Malte Christian Höweler)

Student Thesis (SA)

• Implementation and evaluation of different live migration strategies for Service Function Chaining(SFC) on the OpenStack platform (Alex Sarmanow)
• Evaluation Adaptive Placement and Migration Approaches for Cloud Applications on the Network Softwarization Emulator (Carl Collmann)
• Build a Disaggregated Virtualized Network Function (VNF) Runtime for Elastic Packet Processing. (Xuefan Wang)

Hauptseminar/Oberseminar

• Performance Evaluation of Network Coding as a Virtualized Network Function in the Service Function Chain (Silvio Ankermann)
• Pedestrian Detection Approach with Compute Offloading on the Service Function Chain (SFC) (Xuefan Wang)