Zhangyu Guan
Associate Research Scientist
Education
- Ph.D. in Communication and Information Systems - Shandong University, China (2010)
Zhangyu Guan was an Associate Research Scientist with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. He received his Ph.D. degree in communication and information systems from Shandong University, Jinan, China, in 2010. He was a visiting Ph.D. student with the Department of Electrical Engineering at SUNY Buffalo from 2009 to 2010, advised by Prof. Tommaso Melodia, and later served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at SUNY Buffalo. His research interests included network optimization and experimental evaluation for Internet of Things (IoT), 5G networks, and wireless network security. In 2018, he joined the University at Buffalo, Department of Electrical Engineering, as a tenure-track Assistant Professor.
Publications
2022
Journals & Magazines
“Compressed Sensing Based Low-Power Multi-View Video Coding and Transmission in Wireless Multi-Path Multi-Hop Networks.”
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
(2022)Journal
2021
Journals & Magazines
“Stochastic Channel Access in Underwater Networks With Statistical Interference Modeling.”
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
(2021)Journal
“WNOS: Enabling Principled Software-Defined Wireless Networking.”
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
(2021)Journal
2020
Journals & Magazines
Current cellular networks rely on closed and inflexible infrastructure tightly controlled by a handful of vendors. Their configuration requires vendor support and lengthy manual operations, which prevent Telco Operators (TOs) from unlocking the full network potential and from performing fine grained performance optimization, especially on a per-user basis. To address these key issues, this paper introduces CellOS, a fully automated optimization and management framework for cellular networks that requires negligible intervention (“zero-touch”). CellOS leverages softwarization and automatic optimization principles to bridge Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and cross-layer optimization. Unlike state-of-the-art SDN-inspired solutions for cellular networking, CellOS: (i) Hides low-level network details through a general virtual network abstraction; (ii) allows TOs to define high-level control objectives to dictate the desired network behavior without requiring knowledge of optimization techniques, and (iii) automatically generates and executes distributed control programs for simultaneous optimization of heterogeneous control objectives on multiple network slices. CellOS has been implemented and evaluated on an indoor testbed with two different LTE-compliant implementations: OpenAirInterface and srsLTE. We further demonstrated CellOS capabilities on the long-range outdoor POWDER-RENEW PAWR 5G platform. Results from scenarios with multiple base stations and users show that CellOS is platform-independent and self-adapts to diverse network deployments. Our investigation shows that CellOS outperforms existing solutions on key metrics, including throughput (up to 86% improvement), energy efficiency (up to 84%) and fairness (up to 29%).
“Distributed Joint Power, Association and Flight Control for Massive-MIMO Self-Organizing Flying Drones.”
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
(2020)Journal
Conference Papers
Networks of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), composed of hundreds, possibly thousands of highly mobile and wirelessly connected flying drones will play a vital role in future Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G networks. However, how to control UAV networks in an automated and scalable fashion in distributed, interference-prone, and potentially adversarial environments is still an open research problem. This article introduces SwarmControl, a new software-defined control framework for UAV wireless networks based on distributed optimization principles. In essence, SwarmControl provides the Network Operator (NO) with a unified centralized abstraction of the networking and flight control functionalities. High-level control directives are then automatically decomposed and converted into distributed network control actions that are executed through programmable software-radio protocol stacks. SwarmControl (i) constructs a network control problem representation of the directives of the NO; (ii) decomposes it into a set of distributed sub-problems; and (iii) automatically generates numerical solution algorithms to be executed at individual UAVs.We present a prototype of an SDR-based, fully reconfigurable UAV network platform that implements the proposed control framework, based on which we assess the effectiveness and flexibility of SwarmControl with extensive flight experiments. Results indicate that the SwarmControl framework enables swift reconfiguration of the network control functionalities, and it can achieve an average throughput gain of 159% compared to the state-of-the-art solutions.
“CoBeam: Beamforming-based Spectrum Sharing With Zero Cross-Technology Signaling for 5G Wireless Networks.”
Proc. of IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM)
(2020)Conference
2019
Journals & Magazines
Conference Papers
“LiBeam: Throughput-Optimal Cooperative Beamforming for Indoor Visible Light Networks.”
IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
(2019)Conference
2018
Conference Papers
This article investigates the basic design principles for a new Wireless Network Operating System (WNOS), a radically different approach to software-defined networking (SDN) for infrastructure-less wireless networks. Departing from well-understood approaches inspired by OpenFlow, WNOS provides the network designer with an abstraction hiding (i) the lower-level details of the wireless protocol stack and (ii) the distributed nature of the network operations. Based on this abstract representation, the WNOS takes network control programs written on a centralized, high-level view of the network and automatically generates distributed cross-layer control programs based on distributed optimization theory that are executed by each individual node on an abstract representation of the radio hardware.We first discuss the main architectural principles of WNOS. Then, we discuss a new approach to automatically generate solution algorithms for each of the resulting subproblems in an automated fashion. Finally, we illustrate a prototype implementation of WNOS on software-defined radio devices and test its effectiveness by considering specific cross-layer control problems. Experimental results indicate that, based on the automatically generated distributed control programs, WNOS achieves 18\%, 56\% and 80.4\% utility gain in networks with low, medium and high levels of interference; maybe more importantly, we illustrate how the global network behavior can be controlled by modifying a few lines of code on a centralized abstraction.
“Self-Organizing Flying Drones with Massive MIMO Networking.”
Proc. of Mediterranean Ad Hoc Networking Workshop (Med-Hoc-Net)
(2018)Conference
“Demo Abstract: WNOS: An Optimization-based Wireless Network Operating System.”
Proc. of IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM)
(2018)Conference
2017
Journals & Magazines
“Interview Motion Compensated Joint Decoding for Compressively Sampled Multiview Video Streams.”
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
(2017)Journal
“The value of cooperation: Minimizing user costs in multi-broker mobile cloud computing networks.”
IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing
(2017)Journal
2016
Journals & Magazines
“United Against the Enemy: Anti-Jamming Based on Cross-Layer Cooperation in Wireless Networks.”
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
(2016)Journal
“Distributed Resource Management for Cognitive Ad Hoc Networks with Cooperative Relays.”
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
(2016)Journal
“To Transmit or Not to Transmit? Distributed Queueing Games for Infrastructureless Wireless Networks.”
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
(2016)Journal
“Distributed Algorithms for Joint Channel Access and Rate Control in Ultrasonic Intra-body Networks.”
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
(2016)Journal
Conference Papers
“CU-LTE: Spectrally-Efficient and Fair Coexistence Between LTE and Wi-Fi in Unlicensed Bands.”
Proc. of IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM)
(2016)Conference
2015
Journals & Magazines
“Video transmission over lossy wireless networks: A cross-layer perspective.”
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing
(2015)Journal
Conference Papers
“Multi-view Wireless Video Streaming Based on Compressed Sensing: Architecture and Network Optimization.”
Proc. of ACM Intl. Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc)
(2015)Conference
“Ultrasonic Intra-body Networking: Interference Modeling, Stochastic Channel Access and Rate Control.”
Proc. of IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM)
(2015)Conference
2014
Journals & Magazines
“Cloud-Assisted Smart Camera Networks for Energy-Efficient 3D Video Streaming.”
Computer
(2014)Journal
Conference Papers
“Crowdsourcing Access Network Spectrum Allocation Using Smartphones.”
Proc. of ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets)
(2014)Conference
“Cooperative Anti-jamming for Infrastructure-less Wireless Networks with Stochastic Relaying.”
Proc. of IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM)
(2014)Conference
2013
Journals & Magazines
“Jointly Optimal Rate Control and Relay Selection for Cooperative Wireless Video Streaming.”
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
(2013)Journal
Conference Papers
“Joint Decoding of Independently Encoded Compressive Multi-view Video Streams.”
Proc. of Picture Coding Symposium (PCS)
(2013)Conference
“Distributed Queuing Games in Interference-limited Wireless Networks.”
Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)
(2013)Conference
2012
Conference Papers
“Stochastic Channel Access for Underwater Acoustic Networks with Spatial and Temporal Interference Uncertainty.”
Proc. of ACM Intl. Conf. on UnderWater Networks and Systems (WUWNet)
(2012)Conference
2011
Conference Papers
“Distributed Spectrum Management and Relay Selection in Interference-Limited Cooperative Wireless Networks.”
Proc. of ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom)
(2011)Conference
“On the Effect of Cooperative Relaying on the Performance of Video Streaming Applications in Cognitive Radio Networks.”
Proc. of IEEE Intl. Conf. on Communications (ICC)
(2011)Conference
“Optimizing Cooperative Video Streaming in Wireless Networks.”
Proc. of IEEE Intl. Conf. on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON)
(2011)Conference