Focus on Faculty Talk: Chunyi Peng

All dates for this event occur in the past.

Ohio State - CSE
480 Dreese Labs
2015 Neil Ave
Columbus, OH
United States

Untold Story in Control-Plane Protocol Interactions in 4G/3G Networks

Mobile networks (4G/3G) is the largest wireless infrastructure deployed today. They are offering pervasive data and voice services for billions of mobile users. As a critical network infrastructure, it is supposed to function correctly and reliably. However, due to its complexity, especially in the control plane, the operational mobile networks are not sound and solid as anticipated. In this talk, we have explored the control-plan protocol interaction and revealed problematic interations which have never been disclosed before.  Specifically, we propose signaling diagnosis tools and uncover six instances of problematic interactions. We show that, such control-plane issues span both design defects in the 3GPP standards and operational slips by carriers. They happen along three dimensions of cross layers, cross (circuit-switched and packet-switched) domains, and cross (3G and 4G) systems.We not only verify them through formal method but also validate them through real experiments in operational cellular networks.

This work has been published in ACM SIGCOMM’14.

Host: Prasun Sinha


Chunyi Peng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. She joined the Ohio State University last year (in 2013) after she received my Ph.D in Computer Science at University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to UCLA, she had worked as an associate/assistant researcher in the Wireless and Networking Group at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) between 2005 and 2009. Her research interests are in the broad areas of mobile networking, system and security, with a focus on 3G/4G mobile networks, wireless networking, mobile sensing systems, and network security.

For more information on her work, please visit her homepage.