Sándor Laki, PhD
Assistant professor



Welcome

I am an assistant professor at Faculty of Informatics, Eötvös Loránd University, heading a small research group called Communication Networks Laboratory (CNL). CNL was originally established by Ericsson Research and ELTE, and we still work in close collaboration with various units of Ericsson. My research interests are the general topics of computer networking with special focus on traffic analytics, IP geolocation, application of software defined networking and language abstractions for programmable networking elements.

Recently, my research has shifted towards novel data plane solutions including network programmability and flexibe state-less resource sharing. You can read more about related projects on the project page.

 

News

  • July 2023 - Our project proposal (NATWORK) submitted together with 14 excellent partners from Europe in Spring has been selected for funding in the Horizon Europe framework (6.1M EUR, 3yrs, 14 partners). The project aims to set the foundations and deploy the very first economically realistic, energy efficient and viable bio-inspired AI-based cybersecurity and resilience framework for future 6G networks and services. I'm looking forward to work with this excellent group on shaping the future of 6G networks.
  • June 2023 - What exciting days with the great teams of DESIRE6G! We had a three days long F2F meeting in Budapest, hosted by Ericcson.
  • June 2023 - I presented the goals of DESIRE6G at the plenary meeting of the Hungarian 5G Coalition (5GK - 5G Koalíció (Hungarian site)).
  • June 2023 - Csaba presented our joint work with Stefan Schmid (TU Berlin) about verification methods for P4 code generators at the NetSoft 2023 conference.
  • June 2023 - Chrysa Papagianni (UvA) gave a good summary about our DESIRE6G project and I presented our concept on the unified programmable data plane for 6G networks at the workshop on Future deterministic programmable networks for 6G, 2023 EUCNC and 6G SUMMIT in Gothenburg, Sweden.
  • May 2023 - Our report on Dagstuhl Seminar 22471 (Towards More Flexible and Automated Communication Networks) can be downloaded now.
  • April 2023 - You can apply for fully or partially funded new PhD positions and MSc projects. Final deadline is May 31, 2023.
  • April 2023 - I was invited to serve in the TPC of IEEE GlobeCom 2023 - CISS.
  • April 2023 - I was invited to serve in the TPC of IEEE CloudNet 2023 conference.
  • March 2023 - Our extended paper on in-network traffic caching and filtering of ProfiNet-RT industrial traffic over a wireless channel has been accepted for publication in IEEE Access.
  • Feb 2023 - We held the kick-off meeting of DESIRE6G in Madrid, Spain.
  • Jan 2023 - Our new Horizon Europe project called DESIRE6G on developing the architecture of future 6G networks with deep programmability and distributed intelligence was started. More details on LinkedIn.
  • Dec 2022 - It was a refreshing moment in 2022 to take part in an "in-person" EUROP4 workshop (co-located with ACM CoNext'22) after many years. I was happy to present our work and it was a pleasure to serve as a session chair in this nice event.
  • Nov 2022 - Our paper on a universal P4 code generator called P4RROT has been accepted for publication in SIGCOMM CCR. P4RROT aims to reduce the development time and effort of in-network computation tasks.
  • Nov 2022 - I was invited to serve in the TPC of IEEE NetSoft 2023 conference.
  • Nov 2022 - Our paper on the theoretical analysis of our core-stateless research sharing framework called PPV has finally been accepted and published in IEEE Access journal.
  • Nov 2022 - Dagstuhl Seminar
  • Oct 2022 - Our two papers have been accepted for publication at EUROP4'22 and Student Workshop that will be colocated with ACM CoNext 2022.
  • Sept 2022 - I happily accepted the invitation for serving in the TPC of USENIX ATC'23.
  • Aug 2022 - The project proposal (DESIRE6G) we worked together with 14 excellent partners from Europe in Spring has been selected for funding in the Horizon Europe framework (6M EUR, 3yrs, 14 partners). The project aims at designing an automated management and orchestration framework to support extreme 6G application requirements. The proposed 6G architecure will exploit deep infrastructure programmability to allow more flexible resource allocation and optimization. I'm looking forward to work with this excellent group on shaping the architecure of future 6G networks.
  • July 2022 - I was invited to serve in the TPC of EUROP4 2022 workshop that will be co-located with ACM CoNEXT 2022.
  • June 2022 - Our demo paper on how FQ and more complex resource sharing policies between 35K subscribers at a 100Gbps bottleneck can efficiently be implemented in a Tofino ASIC has been accepted for publication at ACM SIGCOMM 2022 conference.
  • May 2022 - I was invited to serve in the TPC of IEEE CloudNet 2022 conference.
  • May 2022 - Our P4 hackathon proposal (joint submission with Noa Zilberman, Robert Soulé, Fernando Ramos, Damu Ding and Salvatore Signorello) has been accepted at ACM SIGCOMM 2022.
  • April 2022 - Csaba presented our paper on in-network robot control at USENIX NSDI'22.
  • April 2022 - I was invited to serve in the TPC of IEEE CCNC 2023 conference.
  • April 2022 - Our paper on disaggregated in-network event detection has been accepted for publication at IEEE NetSoft 2022.
  • Feb 2022 - Our deep dive into how deep hierarchical QoS can be realized on P4-programmable ASIC in a core-stateless fashion has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (IEEE TNSM).
  • Jan 2022 - Our paper showing how to implement PI2 and DualPI2 AQM algorithms on Intel Tofino ASIC has been accepted for publication at IEEE ICC 2022.
  • Nov 2021 - Nik Sultana from IllinoisTech gave us superexciting seminar talk about the disaggregation and placement of in-network programs.
  • Nov 2021 - Our paper entitled "Building an Internet Router with P4Pi" has been accepted for publication at the 4th European P4 Workshop (EUROP4'21). I'm really looking forward to using P4Pi in my P4 course.
  • Oct 2021 - I happily accepted the invitation for serving in the TPC of EUROP4'21, the annual workshop of the European P4 community.
  • Sept 2021 - I happily accepted the invitation for serving in the TPC of USENIX ATC'22.
  • Sept 2021 - Our new national project (OTKA) on the "Foundations of network data plane program analysis" with more theoretical focus has been launched this September.
  • Sept 2021 - A new project called P4EDGE on maturing our T4P4S compiler and showing how P4 can be moved closer to a wide range of audienece has been launched. P4EDGE is supported by the EU H2020 NGI Pointer consortium.
  • Aug 2021 - We ran a P4Pi (P4 on Raspberry PI for networking education) hackathon at ACM SIGCOMM 2021. All the materials are available in the project's GitHub repository. Thanks to the co-organizers: Noa Zilberman, Robert Soulé, Radostin Stoyanov, Dávid Kis and Péter Vörös.
  • Aug 2021 - Our position paper on incentive-based QoS has been accepted for publication at the QoS measurement workshop of Internet Architecture Board (IAB).
  • June 2021 - Our educational paper on P4PI, a new Raspberry PI-based platform for networking education has been accepted for publication in the July issue of SIGCOMM CCR.
  • June 2021 - Our paper on how in-network computing can help in solving the open issues of cloud robotics has been accepted for publication at USENIX NSDI'22, stay tuned for the camera ready.
  • May 2021 - Our demo paper entitled "A Core-Stateless L4S Scheduler for P4-enabled Hardware Switches with Emulated HQoS” received the INFOCOM 2021 Best Demo Award.
  • May 2021 - Our in-depth tech talk on P4PI:a new hardware platform for networking education was presented at the P4 Workshop 2021. P4PI is a P4 Education Workgroup project and the result of a joint work with Dávid Kis (ELTE), Péter Vörös (ELTE), Noa Zilberman (Oxford Uni.) and Robert Soulé (Yale Uni.). The P4PI talk is avaialble at the workshop site.
  • May 2021 - Our two brief tech talks on P4 and industrial networks and on the missing features of P4 are available among the on-demand videos of the P4 Workshop 2020. The talks rely on joint works with Andreas Kassler (KAU), Gergely Pongrácz (Ericsson), Géza Szabó (Ericsson) and Péter Vörös (ELTE). The workshop is available at:THIS LINK.
  • May 2021 - Our paper on template matching in large-scale point cloud databases has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Access journal.
  • May 2021 - Our demo was presented at IEEE INFOCOM 2021. Thanks Feri for the demo video. The demo video is available at: HERE on YT
  • May 2021 - I was invited to serve in the TPC of IEEE CloudNet 2021 conference.
  • April 2021 - I was invited to serve in the TPC of IEEE CCNC 2022 conference.
  • April 2021 - Our paper on a Deep Q-Network-Based Approach for Active Queue Management has been accepted for publication at EUCNC and 6G Summit 2021.
  • March 2021 - Our short paper entitled "In-network Solution for Network Traffic Reduction in Industrial Data Communication" has been accepted for publication at IEEE NetSoft 2021.
  • Feb 2021 - Our demo paper on L4S Scheduling and emulated HQoS on P4-programmable switches has beed accepted for publication at IEEE INFOCOM 2021.
  • Dec 2020 - Our short paper was presented at the 3rd EUROP4 Workshop.
  • Nov 2020 - Our paper on in-network event detection and filtering for pub/sub communication has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Network and System Management journal. The paper is based on our joint work with Karlstad University and Ericsson Research.
  • Oct 2020 - Our paper on core-stateless forwarding has finally been accepted for publication in the ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking journal. The paper is based our joint work with Ericsson.
  • Oct 2020 - I was invited to serve in the TPC of IEEE NetSoft 2021 conference.
  • Oct 2020 - Our short paper entitled "Towards a Hybrid Next Generation NodeB" has been accepted for publication at the 3rd EUROP4 Workshop, colocated with ACM CoNext 2020.
  • Sept 2020 - We were invited to write a post on our L4S Scheduler for the APNIC blog. The post has just been published: our post at APNIC Blog.
  • Aug 2020 - I was invited to serve in the TPC of EUROP4 Workshop 2020 - co-located with ACM CoNext 2020.
  • July 2020 - I was invited to serve in the TPC of IEEE CCNC 2021 conference.
  • July 2020 - Our paper on a new L4S Scheduler proposal was presented at ACM/IRTF ANRW 2020. The talk is avaialble at: HERE on YT
  • June 2020 - Ferenc presented out paper at the 2nd Workshop on the Future Internet Transport. The talk is available at: HERE on YT
  • May 2020 - Our paper on A Congestion Control Independent L4S Scheduler has been accepted for publication at the ACM/IRTF Applied Networking Research Workshop 2020 (ANRW’20) that will be held together with the IETF-108 meeting.
  • May 2020 - Our paper On the incompatibility of scalable congestion controls over the Internet has been accepted for publication at the 2nd Workshop on the Future of Internet Transport held in co-location with IFIP Networking 2020.
  • January 2020 - Our paper entitled The Price for Asynchronous Execution of Extern Functions in Programmable Software Data Planes has been accepted for publication at the NetProc Workshop of ICIN 2020 (23rd Conference on Innovations in Clouds, Internet and Networks), Paris, France.
  • November 2019 - Our paper entitled "Who will Save the Internet from the Congestion Control Revolution?" has been accepted for publication at the Workshop on Buffer Sizing, Stanford University, CA, USA. The workshop program seems very exciting.
  • September 2019 - I was presenting our poster paper entitled "Asynchronous Extern Functions in Programmable Software Data Planes" at EUROP4 Workshop in Cambridge, UK.
  • August 2019 - Our paper on asynchronous P4 extern function calls in software data planes has been accepted for publication at EUROP4 Workshop 2019.
  • August 2019 - Our two demos were presented at ACM SIGCOMM 2019, Beijing, China.
  • July 2019 - Szilveszter presented our paper on multi-timescale fairness at ACM/IRTF ANRW 2019 in Montreal, Canada. Slides and videos are available at the conference site.
  • July 2019 - We organized a summer school on 5G and beyond for Hungarian students.
  • June 2019 - Prof. JongWon Kim from GIST (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea) was visiting our department and gave a seminar talk on the future perspectives of Software Defined Infrastructures.
  • June 2019 - Our two demo papers submitted to ACM SIGCOMM 2019 have been accepted: 1) Decoupling Delay and Resource Sharing Targets with Efficient Core-Stateless AQM and 2) Towards an AQM Evaluation Testbed with P4 and DPDK.
  • June 2019 - Our paper on Towards Core-Stateless Fairness on Multiple Timescales has been accepted for publication at ACM/IRTF ANRW 2019.
  • May 2019 - Our demo entitled T4P4S & PIE: Towards an AQM Evaluation Testbed with P4 and DPDK was presented at P4 Workshop 2019.
  • April 2019 - Our paper on CoDel enhancement with ECN has been accepted for publication at IFIP WWIC 2019.
  • Feb 2019 - Our paper on Stateless Resource Sharing in Networks with Multi-Layer Virtualization has been accepted for publication at IEEE ICC 2019.
  • Jan 2019 - Our proposal submitted to the open call of H2020 5GinFIRE has been selected for funding. The work starts in March.
  • Nov 2018 - New thesis topics are available under the menu Thesis topics.
  • Sep 2018 - We took part in Researchers' Night 2018!
  • Sep 2018 - FOR MASTER STUDENTS!!! Slides about potential labor topics are available here...
  • Sep 2018 - We were organizing the ADBIS 2018 conference. As a Doctoral Consortium chair I would like to thank all the efforts of our TPC members for their reviews - Lixin, Isabel, Bart and Attila - and the presenters for the interesting talks - Artem, Mohammed and Shruti.
  • Aug 2018 - We held our first networking seminar in August with two invited speakers from GIST, Korea: JongWon Kim gave a nice talk about the challenges of container networking for cloud-native computing while Hyuk Lim was presenting their results on how SDN can help to improve security against cyber attacks.
  • Aug 2018 - Our group was represented at ACM SIGCOMM 2018 by two demos and one poster.
  • Aug 2018 - Our paper ("The Price for Programmability in the Software Data Plane: The Vendor Perspective") has been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of IEEE JSAC.
  • July 2018 - A short video on our industrial demo to be presented at SIGCOMM 2018 this August is available on YouTube.
  • July 2018 - The IETF-102 meeting has just started with more than 1000 participants in Montreal, QC, Canada. Our paper is being presented at ANRW'18, a satelite conference of the IETF meeting tomorrow. I also gave a lightning talk about our work in the HotRFC session today.
  • June 2018 - Our industrial demo ("Scalable Per Subscriber QoS with Core-Stateless Scheduling") submitted together with Ericsson has been accepted for presentation at SIGCOMM 2018.
  • June 2018 - Our poster ("Scalable Surface Reconstruction in the Mobile Edge") and demo ("BB-Gen: A Packet Crafter for P4 Target Evaluation") papers have been accepted for presentation at ACM SIGCOMM 2018.
  • June 2018 - We held a two hours long P4 tutorial and presented our paper at IEEE HPSR 2018.
  • June 2018 - I was awarded the János Bolyai Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. My research will be supported for three years by this programme.
  • June 2018 - Peter and I were successfully presenting our 5G User Plane Function demo entitled "P4 meets 5G" at the 5th P4 Workshop, Stanford, CA, USA. Few pictures about the event are available here.
  • May 2018 - Our paper entitled "Towards a Congestion Control-Independent Core-Stateless AQM" has been accepted for publication at IRTF/ACM ANRW 2018 Conference, Montreal, Canada.
  • April 2018 - Our demo proposal entitled "P4 meets 5G" has been accepted for presentation at P4 Workshop 2018, Stanford, CA, USA. The workshop will be in June 2018.
  • April 2018 - Our paper on the T4P4S P4 compiler has been accepted for publication at IEEE High Performance Switching and Routing (IEEE HPSR) conference in June 2018.
  • April 2018 - In cooperation with University of Campinas, Brazil and Ericsson Research, we were selected to held a P4 tutorial at IEEE High Performance Switching and Routing (IEEE HPSR) conference in June 2018.
  • April 2018 - I was invited to the Ericsson Research Open Day and Ericsson Garage Summit, held in Stockholm, Sweden. It was a very intresting showcase of the research portfolio of Ericsson.
  • March 2018 - I was taking part in the final meeting of Erasmus Mundus TEAM project held in Madrid, Spain. More info...
  • Feb 2018 - We were presenting our results at MONROE User Workshop in Madrid, Spain.
  • Sept 2017 - I was giving a talk about our T4P4S compiler at DPDK Summit Userspace 2017 conference in Dublin, Ireland. For more detials please visit: DPDKSummit.com
  • Sept 2017 - My delegation to the Network development and infrastructures working group of the hungarian 5GK (5G Coalition) effort has been accepted. More information about 5GK is avaialable at 5GK web site (Hungarian only)
  • Sept 2017 - The refreshed list of lab projects for students are available on the Projects tab.
  • June 2017 - Our paper on packet labeling-based resource sharing with a cool title "Take your own share of the PIE" has been accepted.
  • June 2017 - Our paper on A Profile-Based Fast Port Scan Detection Method has been accepted.
  • May 2017 - I was invited to give a presentation on the new trends in the big data world at the annual meeting of NJSZT. Mode details on the site of NJSZT.
  • May 2017 - Our demo and poster on T4P4S was presented at P4 Workshop 2017 held at Stanford University. More details on the workshop's site.
  • March 2017 - Our P4 compiler has been renamed to T4P4S (pronounced as TAPAS) - Translator for P4 Switch programs. The new release has been published on GitHub: https://github.com/P4ELTE/t4p4s
  • Feb 2017 - My project proposal called RECON has been selected for funding in H2020 MONROE OC-2 call. The project starts in March and lasts 12 months.
  • Feb 2017 - I was invited to give a keynote speech at the 4th Winter School of PhD Students on Big Data. Gergő from our team is going to bring practical and interactive lectures on tools from small data analysis with Python to large-scale data processing with HADOOP and SPARK.
  • Jan 2017 - I took part in a round table discussion on "Big Data: education and scope of application" organized by the French Institute in Budapest: link
  • Dec 2016 - Ákos presented our work on the usage of activity trackers in healthcare for patient monitoring at CSCI in Las Vegas, NV, USA.
  • Nov 2016 - I got the John Kemeny Award from the John von Neumann Computer Society (NJSZT).
  • Nov 2016 - BSc and MSc thesis proposals are available at http://networks.elte.hu/index.php/szakdolgozat-es-diplomamunka-temak/. If you are interested in one of the thesis projects, please do not hesitate to contact me. The submission deadline is 1st of December.
  • Nov 2016 - Our paper on how activity trackers can be used in healthcare has been accepted by CSCI'16 conference.
  • Oct 2016 - My research is supported by the Excellence Award of the University.
  • Sept 2016 - The newly established Data Science and Engineering department has finally opened. The department is unique in Hungary, since it is funded by Deutsche Telekom. I'm really proud of having been involved in the preparation work of this new initiative. Besides TU Berlin, Deutsche Telekom and Magyar Telekom our team was also presenting two demos during the opening ceremony. I thank Akos and Gergo for their hard work to make it possible. A video spot about the event, our demo and "the researcher" was shown in the evening news of HírTV: avaialble here.
  • Sept 2016 - The next promotion video of our Smart Active project is available on Ericsson's YouTube channel: Smart Active on YouTube
  • August 2016 - Our P4 switching demo was presented by Peter at SIGCOMM in Brazil.
  • June 2016 - The camera ready version of our SIGCOMM demo paper is available here.
  • June 2016 - Our group officially joined the P4 consortium led by Stanford University. We will do our best to be an active partner of this community having 34 industrial and 7 academic members.
  • June 2016 - The first promotion video of our Smart Active project is finally out - You can try it out in Gold Center soon.
  • June 2016 - Press release on our IoT project called SmartActive is available on one of the largest Hungarian news site.
  • May 2016 - As part of ELTE CNL were successfully participating in Ericsson Univeristy Day 2016 - 1 plenary talk, 2 technical talks, 6 posters and 2 demos.
  • May 2016 - I presented our work on "High-Speed Forwarding: A P4 Compiler with a Hardware Abstraction Library for Intel DPDK" at the 3rd P4 Workshop hosted by Stanford University, CA, USA.
  • Apr. 2016 - My talk submitted to the 3rd P4 Workshop has been accepted. This is the first step towards increasing the visibility of our work on abstract data planes.
  • Apr. 2016 - A new project on state-less resource sharing in IP core networks was launched. I really thank the support of Ericsson.
  • Feb. 2016 - Together with Gergő Gombos, we launched two new courses on Big Data technologies and analytics. Our definite aim is to support the increasing needs of our industrial partners as well as our running projects on telecom data analysis.
  • Jan. 2016 - Happy new year! My son was born, so I am out of office for a while... :)
  • Dec. 2015 - We successfully organized the 1st IoT Pizza at our university - supported by EIT Digital and its FIWARE Liaison project.
  • Nov. 2015 - I was presenting our group at the UNIFI (Universities for Future Internet) workshop and consortium meeting hosted by Fraunhofer FOKUS in Berlin, Germany. The video pitch of this initiative can be seen here: UNIFI video
  • July 2015 - Our paper on the results of NOVI project is finally out in the latest issue of IEEE Communications Magazine, avalaible here.
  • May 2015 - We started a new project on programmable data planes. Thanks Ericsson for the support!
  • May 2015 - I gave a plenary talk on "Future Internet and Big Data research" at the Neumann Day of our faculty.
  • Mar. 2015 - I took part in the selection committee meeting of Erasmus Mundus TEAM project in Tokyo, Japan.
  • Jan. 2015 - Our paper about the NOVI information model is finally available in print: avalaible in the latest FGCS journal.
  • Jan. 2015 - Happy new year!

Sponsors

I thank the following sponsors for supporting my research:
                  

Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in research outputs (published papers, talks, blog postings etc.) are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.