Lixia Zhang

Previous News

September 2023

Mohit Lad (IRL graduate 2008, co-founder of ThousandEyes) was featured in an 18-minutes interview on the BBC's Business Daily podcast. Here's the link.

August 2023

We got 3 papers accepted by the ACM Information Centric Networking Conference 2023:

July 2023

The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) Decentralization of the Internet Research Group (DINRG) hosted a workshop on Centralization in the Internet in June 2021. We finally pushed out the workshop report! The report concludes that the observed Internet centralization is the result of unregulated economy of scale; technology alone is not responsible for the observed consolidation and centralization, nor can it offer effective mitigation solely.

May 2023

Two NDN related papers were presented at IEEE ICC 2023 in May 2023: Secure NDN Packet Encapsulation, and CLedger: A Secure Distributed Certificate Ledger via Named Data.

March 2023

NIST hosted the NDN Community Meeting (NDNComm) March 2-3, 2023. One can find the complete meeting recordings from the above page. Thanks NIST!

September 2022

At 9th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2022), IRL people have 7 papers, 4 of them are joint effort with our collaborators, on NDN-based data distribution for data-intensive science applications, secure mobile-health data sharing, distributed object store, theory model of NDN encoding, NDN congestion control, and an SoK paper on the evolution of NDN transport service designs.

May 2022

In cleaning up my messy file folders, I found this slide deck for a talk I gave at “Workshop on New Trajectories for Communication” organized by Semiconductor Research Corporation in February 2020, Future Networking via Named Secured Data.

I am looking for a postdoc (starting as early as you can). An ideal candidate should be a great team player, with system or system security (not pure crypto) background, and strong hands-on skills. Whoever interested, please contact me by email (please include in your msg the top 3 issues that you believe the NDN team should address now, and in the long run).

January 2022

We received a research grant from Cisco Systems for a joint effort with University of Arizona to work on “Networking LEO Satellites via Named Data”.

November 2021

I attended IEEE MILCOM (11/29-12/2/2021), my first in-person conference since the pandemic. MILCOM organized 3 special sessions on information centric networking, and my group presented 3 papers there.

  1. ”Resilient Brokerless Publish-Subscribe over NDN”
    Philipp Moll, Varun Patil, Davide Pesavento, Lixia Zhang
    IEEE MILCOM 2021, November 2021
  2. ”Investigating the Design Space for Name Confidentiality in Named Data Networking”
    Zhiyi Zhang, Su Yong Won, Lixia Zhang
    IEEE MILCOM 2021, November 2021
  3. ”Enabling Plug-n-Play in Named Data Networking”
    Tianyuan Yu, Philipp Moll, Zhiyi Zhang, Alexander Afanasyev, Lixia Zhang
    IEEE MILCOM 2021, November 2021

October 2021

The Annual NDN Community Meeting 2021 was held online 10/28-29, hosted by NIST again. The NIST team got the recording online in record time.

The 12th NDN Hackathon was held online 10/22-24.

June 2021

The DIN-RG Workshop on The Centralization in the Internet was held online on June 3, 2021. Here is the workshop recording.

May 2021

I was appointed to co-chair the IRTF Decentralized Internet Infrastructure Research Group. My first action is working with my co-chair Dirk Kutscher in organizing a DIN-RG Workshop on The Centralization in the Internet. Here is my one-page whitepaper submission to the workshop (with a few typos fixed).

January 2021

In doing a folder cleanup, I crossed a 2002 paper by Paul Baran that seem worth sharing:
The Beginnings of Packet Switching: Some Underlying Concepts.

I also found the slide deck for a short talk I gave at ACM SIGCOMM 2019 N2Women meeting,
A few lessons from an accidental professor, just to share with whoever interested in taking a look.

November 2020

Internet Archicture Board organized a virtual workshop on COVID-19 Network Impacts. Several of us submitted a whitepaper titled "Identifying the Disease from the Symptoms: Lessons for Networking in the COVID-19 Era".

September 2020

NIST hosted another NDN Comminity Meeting September 10-11, 2020. One can find the recording at https://www.nist.gov/news-events/events/2020/09/ndn-community-meeting.

August 2020

I gave a keynote at SIGCOMM 2020, the slides can be found here. People asked many interesting questions, here is the Slack point to that great discussion (including the question "why didn’t IP multicast ever get widely deployed?" that may be interesting to many people)

Two recent articles published on IEEE Computer:

July 2020

This page needs an update, one reason is to include a blog series, but I got my first blog post first :) Do not Associate Internet Centralization with DNS in the Absence of Facts

April 2020

An Experimental NDN Video service is up and running! Try it out and chip your help in.

The NDN team just made a new codebase release to start the new year.

December 2019

I was unable to attend the Second IEEE HotICN conference held December 13-15, 2019 in Chengdu, China, but managed to deliver a keynote via zoom (will dig out the slides and post here)

September 2019

NDN Community Meeting (NDNComm) is an annual event that brings together a community of researchers from academia, industry, and government, as well as users and other parties interested in the development of Named Data Networking (NDN) technology. NIST hosted 2019 NDNcomm September 5-6, 2019 in DC. One can find the agenda and the meeting video recording on the NIST website.

June 2019

We are busy preparing for the 2nd Annual project meeting of NSF-Intel Partnership Program on Information-Centric Networking in Wireless Edge Networks (ICN-WEN), to report the progress of ICN-Enabled Secure Edge Networking with Augmented Reality (ICE-AR) over the last year.

May 2019

Alex Afanasyev chaired a panel on "ICN coming out of age" at IEEE ICC 2019 RAFNET Workshop on May 24. We also presented a paper on A Note on Routing Scalability in Named Data Networking at the workshop.

March 2019

UCLA hosted the 11th NDN Retreat March 7-8, followed by the 8th NDN Hackathon.

January 2019

An NDN IoT experiment package was released on January 1 -- what a great gift to add to the new year celebration!

November 2018

Long overdue, we finally put together An Overview of Security Support in Named Data Networking, appeared in November 2018 issue of IEEE Communications.

October 2018

Our poster on NDNoT: A Framework for Named Data Network of Things won the Best Poster Award at ACM Information Centric Networking Conference 2018.

One question that comes up again and again about how NDN could ever get rolled out, given the existing investment into TCP/IP infrastructure: this reminded me a ;Login interview KC and I did early 2016. Quoted below is the ending paragraph of that interview article, if we can learn something from history:

September 2018

Our ACM ICN 2018 paper “KITE: Producer Mobility Support in Named Data Networking” represents a promising solution to NDN protocol mobility problem.

NDN Community Meeting (NDNComm) is an annual event that brings together a community of researchers from academia, industry, and government, as well as users and other parties interested in the development of Named Data Networking (NDN) technology. NIST hosted 2018 NDNcomm in September 19-20, 2018.

September 2017

UCLA Engineering news release on our project ICN-Enabled Secure Edge Networking with Augmented Reality (ICE-AR).

March 2017

University of Memphis hosted a great NDN Community Meeting on March 23-24, 2017, followed by the 4th NDN Hackathon on March 25-26.

December 2016

Our paper "Anticipating policy and social implications of named data networking" is published in the Dec 16 issue of Communications of the ACM.

November 2016

The best part of teaching is watching your students' success: just saw a great article about ThousandEyes, a company started with two students out of Internet Research Lab: "These guys built a $273 million startup from discarded computers and an almost secret source of seed money".

Back in 2006 we published a paper titled "Security Through Publicity" in the First USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security. 10 years down the road, this notion is widely applied to address Internet security, e.g. see Certificate Transparency.

See one of our latest papers Sharing mHealth Data via Named Data Networking presented at ACM ICN, September 2016.

August 2016

The NDN team published The Named Data Networking (NDN) Teams Perspective on IPR and Licensing of NDN and Related ICN Technologies, which discusses the history of IPR and licensing in NDN, as well as the relationship to CCNx, in response to community questions.

April 2016

"A Survey of Mobility Support in Named Data Networking" will be presented at INFOCOM 2016 NOM Workshop.

March 2016

UCSD will be hosting another NDN Project Retreat March 22-23 2016 (with NDN Hackathon on March 20-21).

The spring 2016 issue of USENIX; login published an interview article on NDN.

February 2016

I gave a short talk at NSF Wireless Cities Workshop: "New Applications via Opportunistic Peer-to-Peer Wireless Communications".

I was the featured faculty member in the last department annual report.

October 2015

Alex Afanasyev presented the paper "The Story of ChronoShare, or How NDN Brought Distributed Secure File Sharing Back" at IEEE MASS 2015 Workshop on Content Centric Networking.

September 2015

The free registration for Next NDN Community Meeting (September 28-29, 2015 at UCLA) is closing soon! Everyone is welcome to participate!

Here is a nice NetworkWorld article with all useful pointers for the event.

2nd ACM ICN conference was held September 30 -- Oct 2 in San Francisco. The NDN team presented 4 papers there.

June 2015

Alex Afanasyev received UCLA Chancellor Post-Doc Award.

April 2015

I attended INFOCOM 2015 in Hong Kong where so many people talked to me about their interest in pursuing NDN research! I participated in the Panel on "What Should the Future Internet be Centered: Information, Service, Mobility, or User?" and here is my presentation in answering that question.

October 2014

Our paper, "The Shape and Size of Threats: Defining a Networked System's Attack Surface", received NPSec 2014 Best Paper Award.

September 2014

The first NDN Community Meeting was held September 4-5, 2014 on UCLA campus.

May 2014

NSF announced the Future Internet Architecture - Next Phase (FAI-NP) awards.

March 2014

NDN project is marching forward with big stride! We are getting close to finish up a brand new NDN Forwarding Daemon.

Our paper VANET via Named Data Networking was presented at INFOCOM 2014 NOM workshop in April.

January 2014

Busy hosting 3 NDN project meetings at UCLA! (on NDN routing, NDN forwarding daemon, and trust management).

September 2013

ICNP 2013 is coming soon, with a new theme on Information-Centric Networking.

August 2013

SIGCOMM 2013 ICN Workshop was held in Hong Kong August 12, 2013. NDN team presented a paper "NLSR: Named-data Link State Routing Protocol" at ICN'13.

There was an NDN session on the second day of AsiaFI Summer School 2013, right before the ICN Workshop.

NDN website got a new face! Check out our Year-2 progress report and other news there.

A second CCNx Community Meeting was hosted by INRIA the week after. A lot of progress since the first CCN community meeting a year ago!

July 2013

After missing the last IETF (one of the few I missed over 27 years), I attended IETF87 in Berlin 7/28-8/2.

September 2012

A second Dagstuhl Seminar on "Information-centric networking" was held in early September. Compared to the first one at end of 2010, one can see clearly how much the area has moved forward.

August 2012

In the process of preparing a tutorial paper on NDN I collected a list of old papers, which may be interesting to people in networking area. People may also be interested in a set of design principles summarized in Professors Saltzer & Kaashoek's book on "Principles of Computer System Design".

I attended US-China Workshop on Environmental Monitoring for Public Health and Disaster Recovery and gave a talk on "Networking Cyberphysical Systems via Named Data". Stay tuned to read the final workshop report here.

July 2012

A few NDN Tech-Reports went online this month. In addition, we published a short paper on Adaptive Forwarding in Named Data Networking in July issue of CCR.

We released a ns-3 based NDN simulator in June. Please try it out and let us know your comments/bug reports/new feature suggestions! Interested users are welcome to joint ndnSIM mailing list.

June 2012

If March was a busy month, then June has been twice as busy. I hit the ground running right after my last lecture of spring quarter. I attended the annual Hong Kong Research Grant Review Panel and was invited to half dozen universities and institutions around China to talk about NDN. More and more people become interested and excited about the named data networking direction!

March 2012

March was a busy month. As soon as winter quarter teaching ended, Jim, Van and myself attended AsiaFI NDN Hands-on Workshop held at Seoul National University March 19-21; I went to Paris for IETF83 afterwards; then three of us met again at INFOCOM NOMEN Workshop on March 30th.

February 2012

Recently I've been named the holder of Postel Chair in Computer Science.

September 2011

PARC hosted a successful CCN Community Workshop on September 9, 2011.

August 2011

Zhenkai Zhu attended SIGCOMM and presented his work "ACT: Audio Conference Tool Over Named Data Networks" at SIGCOMM ICN Workshop.

May 2011

Lucas Wang, a graduate student in IRL, made a public release of EyeP, an IPv4 address allocation and usage visualization tool.

The NDN project held a retreat at PARC May 23-24; we also attended the NSF FIA program PI meeting May 25-26. Here is the NDN team's presentation at the PI meeting.

1/1/2011

Here is what I put out on 1/1/2010:

1/1/2010: The new decade seems to need a new acronym--the thing we used to call "cellphone" is no longer a phone; it has become a general-purpose computer and making calls is merely one of its many app's (e.g. look at your iPhone). At the same time a number of new types of hand-held "devices" (for lack of a better word) have shown up, e.g. Amazon's Kindle, iPod, or this forever coming Apple tablet.

Here is a suggestion for a new acronym for them all: HHDs, for Hand-Held Devices.

I believe people would generally agree with me that the last year is a year marked with leaps and bounces in technology advances and usages of hand-held devices, even though I do not know whether people liked the acronym HHDs :-)

October 2010

October 2010: We have set up a website for our new project Named Data Networking.

September 2010

One of our ongoing projects is to measure the prevalence and persistency of the usage of unallocated IP address blocks. This got me to reread 2 technical reports from 2003 that never got published, they still look rather relevant today:

August 2010

Our joint proposal with PARC and eight other universities, "Named Data Networking (NDN)" which is based on Van Jacobson's vision of CCN, has been funded under NSF's Future Internet Architectures (FIA) program (see NSF's press release).

April 2010

Our paper on "Investigating occurrence of duplicate updates in BGP announcements" received PAM 2010 Best Paper Award.

3/21/2010

Today is the first day at IETF77. Accidentally, or not accidentally, several people talked to me about how to secure today's global routing or DNS systems, given that not only solution developments take time but the adoption is also uncertain and slow. My answer: adding a monitoring system can be an effective and readily deployable first step towards securing your system. See our Cyclops global routing monitoring system, and SecSpider DNSSEC monitoring system.

1/1/2010

The new decade seems to need a new acronym--the thing we used to call "cellphone" is no longer a phone; it has become a general-purpose computer and making calls is merely one of its many app's (e.g. look at your iPhone). At the same time a number of new types of hand-held "devices" (for lack of a better word) have shown up, e.g. Amazon's Kindle, iPod, or this forever coming Apple tablet.

Here is a suggestion for a new acronym for them all: HHDs, for Hand-Held Devices.

December 2009

As the end of 2009 approaches, we received a nice email (a nice Chritmas gift:) from the editors of Computer Networks commenting our paper submitted to a special issue on Interdisciplinary Paradigms for Networking:

"... In stark contrast, your paper is simply beautiful. It is well organized, clearly presented in fine English with obvious effort made to effectively communicate. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and am sure that our readers will, too. I can imagine that it will inspire researchers to attack networking problem along the lines you indicate. May it be cited at the high rate that it deserves!
Sorry for so many words but I do want to thank you for a lovely paper!
Here is that paper (and Michael deverses the major credit!):
A Taxonomy of Biologically Inspired Research in Computer Networking
Michael Meisel, Vasilis Pappas, Lixia Zhang

September 2009

two of our recent papers may look interesting to people:

Inter-Administrative Challenges in Managing DNSKEYs
Eric Osterweil, Lixia Zhang
IEEE Security and Privacy: Securing the Domain Name System 7(5), September 2009

Supporting Mobility in the Global Internet
Lixia Zhang, Ryuji Wakikawa, Zhenkai Zhu
ACM MOBICOM MICNET Workshop, September 2009.

July 2009

I attended IETF75 held in Stockholm 7/26-31/09.

Our project team gave 2 talks at the Routing Research Group meeting on July 31.

In preparing for IETF75 we made several Internet draft submissions.

We presented 2 papers at The Workshop on Trust and Security in the Future Internet (FIST '09):

March 2009

IETF74 was held in San Francisco. Our project team gave a few talks at the Routing Research Group meeting:

February 2009

After couple of years of hard work on design, development, collecting feedback from operators and revising again, Cyclops is finally getting into a good shape! Ricardo is still busy with further tunings but an annoucement to NANOG will probably show up soon.

January 2009

I am teaching 2 courses during winter 2009, CS118 (Introduction to Networking) and CS217A (Internet Architecture & Protocols). This will keep me extremely busy for next 3 months.

November 2008

It is commonly recognized that the Internet AS-level topology inferred from publically available BGP data is incomplete, however there has been no quantitative estimate on exactly how incomplete the inferred topology might be. We addressed this question in a recent technical report, "Quantifying the Completeness of the Observed Internet AS-level Structure".

October 2008

Several things to report this month.

August 2008

I happened to cross my very first published paper "Why TCP Timers Don't Work Well" (SIGCOMM 1986 Best Student Paper Award), and was a bit amazed by how well it reads 22 years later :-)

July 2008

My paper "A Retrospective View of NAT" will appear in IEEE Network Special Issue on Middleboxes, September 2008 (Time flies! 9 years have passed since I coined the word middlebox back in 1999).

June 2008

Summer internship seems the fashion this summer: Jonathan Park went to Intel Labs; Ricardo Oliveira went to Juniper; and Eric Osterweil went to PARC to work on a project led by Van Jacobson.

Ricardo had a busy month, he attended SIGMETRICS 2008 to present our paper on "In Search of the elusive Ground Truth: The Internet's AS-level Connectivity Structure", as well as NANOG 43 and presented "Cyclops: An Internet AS-level Observatory"(slides)

December 2007

Dan Jen and Michael Meisel gave a presentation at the IRTF Routing Research Group meeting held in Vancouver, Canada on "APT: A Practical Transit Mapping Service".

October 2007

I wrote an article for IETF Journal on "A Retrospective View of NAT".

June 2007

I missed NANOG-40, but 3 IRLers made it, each gave a talk: Mohit chaired the BGP Tools BoF and presented Link-Rank, Eric presented BGP-Origins, and Ricardo presented a lightning talk on Cyclops.

BGP-Origins goes live and is eager for community participation and feedback.

March 2007

Recently there have been lots discussions on "separating locators from identifiers". However different communities using this phrase to mean different things. To clarify the terminology, I gave a short talk at recent HIP Research Group meeting(slides).

February 2007

I was appointed to co-chair the IRTF Routing Research Group with Tony Li of cisco.

The Internet routing scalability has been a focus of recent discussions in the IETF community (see mailing lists architecture-discuss@ietf.org, ram@iab.org). IAB held a workshop on Routing and Addressing in October 2006. Here is the latest draft of the workshop report.

January 2007

IAB held a workshop on "Unwanted Internet Traffic" during March 2006. Here is the rworkshop report. We welcome your comments!

September 2006

I wrote a short article for IETF Journal on multihoming impact on routing scalability and GSE analysis.

March 2006

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) celebrated its 20th Anniversary. As one of the 21 attendees for the first IETF meeting held in January 1986, I was interviewed by the IETF Journal.
Here is my interview.

Anniversary cake