Education
- Ph.D. in Communication and Information Systems - Shandong University, China (2010)
Research Interests
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
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%).
LinkNetworks 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.
Link