Purdue University ECE's Y. Charlie Hu wins Best Paper Runner-up at ACM IMC 2023 for Cellular Network Control-plane Traffic Modeling
A paper by Y. Charlie Hu, Michael and Katherine Birck Professor of ECE in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, has won Best Paper runner-up at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2023 Internet Measurement Conference (IMC). The gathering is the premier ACM conference on measurement-based research in data communications.
Hu’s paper, entitled “Modeling and Generating Control-Plane Traffic for Cellular Networks,” develops a tool to help people who design and study cellular networks come up with better ways to evaluate and benchmark new architecture designs.
In recent years, with 5G deployment gaining momentum, the control-plane traffic in the cellular network for handling user activities such as mobility has witnessed a significant increase. Such drastically increased load on the control plane of cellular networks challenges cellular network designers and researchers to innovate on cellular network architecture design in the control plane. Doing so requires access to large-scale, real traces of cellular network control-plane which is typically not available due to privacy/business concerns of cellular network operators.
The paper fills this void by developing the first cellular network control-plane traffic model and traffic generator to synthesize large-scale control-plane traffic that mimics real traffic in production cellular networks for LTE and 5G. The developed traffic generator has been open-sourced to the academic and industry to facilitate innovations in the core network design of 5G and NextG networks.
This research was a collaboration between Purdue ECE, the Department of Computer Science, and AT&T. The leading student on the project, Jiayi Meng, has since graduated and joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Arlington.