Professor Liu Receives Prestigious NSF CAREER Award

[USER:385|profilelink], Polytechnic Institute of NYU assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for his research proposal titled “Next-Generation Peer-to-Peer Streaming: Theory and Design.”

The CAREER award is one of the most prestigious awards granted to up-and-coming science and engineering faculty who, according to the NSF, “exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.”

With the esteem of the CAREER award comes a research grant of $450,000 that will help fund Professor Liu’s research on next-generation peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming systems over the next five years. He and his team will develop new theory and design solutions for emerging Internet applications, including live and on-demand video streaming, multi-party video conferencing, massively multiplayer online games, and networked virtual environments (an abstract of his proposal follows this article).

“P2P technology has become a new paradigm to build many of today’s Internet applications at low infrastructure costs. The CAREER grant’s vital funding will help us design P2P streaming systems that will be able to bear the explosive amount of Internet traffic created by more and more people streaming videos, collaborating online with hundreds, or even thousands of other users, and a host of other data-heavy activities,” explained Professor Liu.

Professor Liu received a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an MS in automation from the University of Science and Technology of China. He joined Polytechnic in 2005 following a senior postdoctoral research position in UMass’ Computer Networks Research Group. His CAREER award sits atop his growing list of honors: Best Paper Award, IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2009; Best Paper Award, Multimedia Communications Technical Committee of IEEE Communications Society, 2008; Best Paper Award, the First Workshop on Networks for Grid Applications (GridNets), 2004; Presidential Graduate Award, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 1997; and the Guo Moruo Scholarship, 1993, the highest scholarship of the University of Science of Technology of China.

Abstract

Next-Generation Peer-to-Peer Streaming: Theory and Design Proposal

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology has enabled large-scale streaming services on the Internet. The success of the next-generation P2P streaming systems largely hinges on new designs delivering a higher level of efficiency, robustness and incentives. At the same time, the increasing popularity and high-streaming rate of P2P streaming systems have already generated significant traffic stress inside ISPs' networks. The operations of future P2P streaming systems will have significant impact on the stability and efficiency of the global network infrastructure. The PI and his PhD students are developing new theory and design for the next generation P2P streaming systems. They study the service differentiation in P2P streaming to address peer heterogeneity and provide incentives.

They derive the minimum delay bounds for realtime P2P streaming and propose streaming algorithms to approach the bounds. They apply the low-delay streaming algorithms to live video streaming and 3D streaming. They develop ISP-friendly P2P streaming design to largely reduce the traffic stress imposed on ISP networks by P2P streaming applications. They also build prototypes for the proposed new designs. The research of this project will lead to open protocols, software and tools, allowing a multitude of developers, researchers, and companies to expand, improve, and evolve the next-generation P2P streaming systems. Important insights and key techniques developed in this project can also be generalized to study data streaming in general distributed systems, such as Content Delivery Networks and distributed data centers.