Research Profile
Dr. Xin Sun’s research interests are computer networks and networked systems, with a focus on practical design, management and security challenges.
Recently, he has been working on the following projects:
- A systematic approach to enterprise network management: Despite their prevalence, importance, and complexity, enterprise networks are managed in a completely manual and ad-hoc way today. Managers of enterprise networks must manually choose from a slew of protocols, low-level mechanisms, and options, in order to meet a wide range of security, resilience, and performance requirements (e.g., ingress filtering, controlling access to privileged databases.). However, the
current “protocol by protocol” method of network management does not allow the manager to ensure that the requirements are met consistently across the entire network. As a result, design faults and configuration errors account for a substantial number of network problems and are exploited by over 65% of cyber-attacks according to recent statistics. Dr. Sun’s research seeks to develop a fundamentally new systematic approach to the management of enterprise networks, which centers on abstracting and formulating each migration task in terms of their network-wide performance, security, and resilience requirements. The formulations capture the correctness and feasibility constraints, and model each task as one of optimizing desired criteria subject to the constraints. - Planning beneficial adoption of cloud computing to deliver existing enterprise applications: Cloud computing is being heralded as “the next big thing”, promising to reduce enterprise IT costs and improve business agility. Despite the significant interests from both cloud providers and potential customers, it remains a great challenge for many enterprises to adopt cloud computing to deliver their existing applications. Two major barriers are: (i) enterprise applications are often faced with stringent performance requirements (e.g., response time), which can be tricky to guarantee in the cloud settings; and (ii) industry-specific (e.g., health care) regulations and national privacy laws
may restrict what data can be migrated to the cloud. To eliminate these barriers and foster cloud computing adoption, Dr. Sun is currently investigating a hybrid architecture where enterprise applications are partly hosted on-premise and partly in the cloud. The model seeks to maximize the IT cost savings, while taking into account practical constraints such as enterprise-specific regulations, dependencies among components, and increased transaction delays that may result from the migration.
Previous Accomplishments
- Awards
- Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship, Purdue University Graduate School.
- Collaboration
- Naval Postgraduate School
- Purdue University
Relevant Publications
- X. Sun, S. Rao and Geoffrey Xie, “Modeling Complexity of Enterprise Routing Design”, ACM CoNEXT, 2012.
- X. Sun and S. Rao, “A Cost-Benefit Framework for Judicious Enterprise Network Redesign”, IEEE INFOCOM, 2011.
- Y. Sung, X. Sun, S. Rao, G. Xie and D. Maltz , “Towards Systematic Design of Enterprise Networks”, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Volume 19, Issue 3, June 2011.
- X. Sun, Y. Sung, S. Krothapalli and S. Rao, “A Systematic Approach for Evolving VLAN Design”, IEEE INFOCOM, 2010.
- M. Hajjat, X. Sun, Y. Sung, D. Maltz, S. Rao, K. Sripanidkulchai and M. Tawarmalani, “Cloudward Bound: Planning for Beneficial Migration of Enterprise Applications to the Cloud”, ACM SIGCOMM, 2010.