CS&E Colloquium: Demystifying the Cellular Black Box: Cross-Layer Visibility for Infrastructure-Application Co-Design

The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. This week's speaker, Yaxiong Xie (University of Buffalo), will be giving a talk titled "Demystifying the Cellular Black Box: Cross-Layer Visibility for Infrastructure-Application Co-Design."

Abstract

Cellular networks remain a black box due to proprietary architectures, vendor-specific optimizations, and closed resource management, making it difficult to analyze and optimize their real-world behavior. This lack of transparency creates challenges for both network infrastructure design and application performance optimization, as higher-layer protocols operate with limited visibility into underlying network conditions. In this talk, we introduce NG-Scope and CellNinjia, two measurement tools that provide cross-layer visibility into the Radio Access Network (RAN), exposing critical cellular mechanisms such as resource allocation, scheduling, and buffering. By leveraging these insights, we advocate for infrastructure-application co-design, where networks and applications dynamically adapt to each other for improved efficiency. We demonstrate how measurement-driven optimizations enable cellular-aware congestion control, adaptive real-time applications, and energy-efficient traffic shaping, significantly improving Quality of Experience (QoE) and network utilization. Our findings emphasize the need for cross-layer measurement and feedback loops to demystify cellular networks, paving the way for next-generation intelligent and adaptive wireless systems.

Biography

Yaxiong Xie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. His research focuses on next-generation mobile networks, with an emphasis on building networked systems that enhance performance, efficiency, and adaptability for emerging applications such as video streaming, video conferencing, and mobile sensing. He has also led the development of widely used open-source tools, including NG-Scope, a fine-grained telemetry tool for next-generation cellular networks, and Atheros CSI Tool, a high-resolution channel state information extraction tool for Wi-Fi sensing applications. His work has been published in top venues, including SIGCOMM, MobiCom, NSDI, MobiSys, SigMetrics, UbiComp, CoNEXT, and SenSys, and has been recognized with the SIGMOBILE Research Highlight and the MobiSys Best Artifact Award. Before joining UB, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, working with Professors Kyle Jamieson and Jennifer Rexford.