Chunyi Peng

Chunyi Peng has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation for her work cellular networks. As the technology evolves from the fourth generation (4G) to 5G and beyond, there is a need to incorporate in these networks a substantially higher degree of intelligence than is present today.

“Current 4G systems don’t provide sufficient information on network behaviors, making it challenging to optimize performance and diagnose failures, and furthermore discouraging the deployment of new applications like virtual and augmented realities, and autonomous vehicles,” said Peng. Her project seeks to enhance intelligence in the 4G/5G signaling subsystem, offering network control utilities like radio resource control and mobility management.

“This work will lead to improvements in performance and reliability for our mobile Internet infrastructure, seeking to influence the upcoming 5G and post-5G standardization,” she said.

Peng will work closely with mobile network companies during this project. She will develop Amplifying Intelligence in Mobile Network Systems (AIM), a multi-disciplinary solution that applies machine learning, data science, distributed systems and computing theory to mobile networking. It offers protocol and function analytics, control-plane signaling for data access, enhanced error-handling design and mobile VR for data-plane signaling intelligence. AIM will tackle the problem of high complexity and lack of verification in the infrastructure, as well as addressing the current lack of information about underlying network operations at the level of the mobile operating system.