BINH NGUYEN
50. Central Campus Drive, Room 3490A Salt Lake City, UT 84112
(801) · 673 · 3129 binh ‘at’ cs.utah.edu
RESEARCH INTERRESTS
Mobile Networking, Software-Defined Network, Network Architecture, Network Congestion Control.
EDUCATION
University of Utah
PhD in Computer Science.
GPA: 3.93/4.0
Advisor: Prof. Jacobus (Kobus) Van der Merwe
August 2012 - present
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
August 2008 - June 2012
Bachelor in Computer Engineering.
Thesis: “Design and implementation of a small scale wireless sensor network for environmental monitoring.”
Thesis advisor: Prof. Yanmin Zhu.
RESEARCH & WORK EXPERIENCE
Bell Labs
Student Intern
May 2015 - August 2015
Murray Hill, NJ
· Working on understanding network requirements for emerging Internet Of Things devices/services and
design a novel mobile network architecture that combines SDN, NFV, and protocols to better support
IoT.
· Developing a prototype for the proposed network architecture using OpenAirInterface eNodeB, OpenEPC
EPC core network, and OpenvSwitch.
At&t Labs Research
Student Intern
May 2014 - August 2014
Bedminster, NJ
· Work on anomaly detection in a large-scale operational mobile network.
· Design & build an anomaly detection system.
· Process big data using Hadoop, Pig.
Flux Research Group Univeristy of Utah
Research Assistant
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January 2013 - present
Salt Lake City, UT
Work on building PhantomNet - a mobile network testbed for education and research.
Work with EPC (Evolved Packet Core) software (OPENEPC) and commercial LTE base stations.
Study TCP network performance in LTE-EPC networks and the LTE stack protocols.
Use NS3 network simulator to simulate LTE-EPC networks and study TCP performance.
University of Utah
Teaching Assistant
· Course: Computer Architecture (CS3810).
TECHNICAL SKILLS
Agust 2012 - December 2012
Salt Lake City, UT
Computer Languages
Network Protocols
Tools
Others
C, C++, Java, Python, Perl, Bash, MIPS, Pig, Spark
LTE stack (RRC, PDCP, RLC, MAC), TCP
Hadoop, NS3, Mininet.
OpenvSwitch, OpenAirInterface, OPENEPC.
PUBLICATIONS
• ABSENCE: Usage-based Failure Detection in Mobile Networks
Binh Nguyen, Zihui Ge, Jacobus Van der Merwe, He Yan, and Jennifer Yates
MobiCom 2015: The 21st International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
• PhantomNet: Research Infrastructure for Mobile Networking, Cloud Computing and SoftwareDefined Networking
Arijit Banerjee, Junguk Cho, Eric Eide, Jonathon Duerig, Binh Nguyen, Robert Ricci, Jacobus
(Kobus) Van der Merwe, Kirk Webb, and Gary Wong
ACM GetMobile 19(2), April 2015
• Efficient, Adaptive and Scalable Device Activation for M2M Communications
Arijit Banerjee, Binh Nguyen, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Sneha Kumar Kasera, Seungjoon Lee, and
Jacobus Van der Merwe
IEEE SECON 2015: IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking.
• Towards Understanding TCP Performance on LTE/EPC Mobile Networks
Binh Nguyen, Arijit Banerjee, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Sneha Kumar Kasera, Seungjoon Lee,
Aman Shaikh, and Jacobus Van der Merwe
ACM SIGCOMM 2014 All Things Cellular workshop.
• SMORE: Software-Defined Networking Mobile Offloading Architecture
Junguk Cho, Binh Nguyen, Arijit Banerjee, Robert Ricci, Jacobus Van der Merwe, and Kirk
Webb
ACM SIGCOMM 2014 All Things Cellular workshop.
PROJECTS
PhantomNet
I have been involved with the PhantomNet (http://phantomnet.org) since 2013. PhantomNet is a mobile testbed for research and education where users can get their own LTE/EPC network and conduct
end-to-end experiments between User Equipments (terminals) and the Internet. I have been working on
the EPC core network of the testbed with OPENEPC (http://www.openepc.com) software. I am also
involved in deploying real commercial LTE small cells (http://www.ipaccess.com), OpenAirInterface
SDR eNodeB and have been working with various LTE/EPC protocols on those devices.
Software-defined network: SMORE
SMORE is an architecture for traffic offloading in LTE/EPC network. The idea is to insert a SDN
layer between the LTE RAN and the EPC core to continuously monitor and offload a subset of traffic
based on certain needs without modifying the LTE/EPC infrastructure. I worked on the control and
monitoring part of SMORE where control messages (S1AP/NAS) between base stations and the core
network are continuously captured to extract information to drive the offloading decisions. The offloading decisions are forwarded to a Ryu Openflow controller to modifies the flow table in the OpenvSwitch
in the SDN layer to offload traffic.
Towards Understanding TCP Performance on LTE/EPC Mobile Networks
In this project we wanted to look under the hood deep into the LTE/ECP mobile networks to understand underlying reasons that could potentially explain problems with TCP performance in LTE/EPC
networks. In specific, we found that (1) different handover mechanisms in the LTE/EPC network could
increase the queuing delay or reduce throughput of TCP and (2) sudden load increase in a base station
could cause TCP timeouts. We used NS3 simulator to mimic handovers due to mobility and load
increase in base stations. We implemented lossless handover protocol in NS3 and compared it with
seamless handover.
Efficient, Adaptive and Scalable Device Activation for M2M Communications
In this work we propose an architecture for cellular device activation that will allow the network to
dynamically adapt the manner in which it performs device activation by taking into account current
network conditions as well as M2M application specific dynamics. The proposed architecture does
not negatively affect the human-to-human traffic and is enabled with minimum change to the current
EPC architecture. I worked on understanding the effect of LTE/EPC paging protocol latency on TCP
performance: when the number of M2M device increases, the paging successful rate of normal human-tohuman devices could be harmfully affected, this leads to a sudden increase of end-to-end latency which
is mistreated as time-out by TCP and results in TCP performance degradation. From the experiment
results, we show that our proposed architecture helps avoid this time-out issue with TCP.
Large scale failure detection in mobile networks
The goal of this project is to detect failures that are not detected by current monitoring systems. By
using users’ call data records (CDR), we can obtain normal usage patterns of aggregations of mobile
devices and observe abnormal low usages to map them to outages or performance degradations in
the networks. I designed and implemented a system called ABSENCE. This system leverages a large
Hadoop cluster’s computational power to process a huge amount of CDR data (7-8 TB per month) and
detects failures in a large scale mobile network in real time. The system was able to detect real network
disruptions in a operational network in the U.S. The system is currently deployed in a pre-production
environment of the operator.
Novel Mobile network architecture/protocols for emerging Internet of Things
The goal of this project is to study limitations of the current LTE/EPC (4G) network architecture/protocols that is not appropriate/optimal for emerging Internet of Things (IoT) devices and
design a novel mobile network architecture that combines SDN, NFV and mobile protocols to better supports the devices. Specifically, unlike human smart-phones IoT devices post unique challenges
such as huge number of devices, wide-range of network requirements, low overhead communications, low
battery/capability, low latency for emerging applications. Currently, I am working on a prototype for
our proposed network architecture/protocols using OpenAirInterface SDR eNodeB, OPENEPC EPC
core network and OpenvSwitch.
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
Reviewer for 2014 IEEE/ACM Transactions On Networking (ToN).
AWARDS
NSF travel grant for Mobicom 2015, Paris, France.
$45,000 Scholarship for 4 years study aboard granted by Vietnam Ministry of Education in 2007.
Excellent undergraduate student scholarship granted by Shanghai Municipal Government in 2009 &
2010 & 2011.
1st Prize High School Physics competition in 2005 & 2006.