Nitinder Mohan

About

I am currently working as a Postdoctoral fellow in Chair of Connected Mobility, Technical University of Munich, Germany with Prof. Dr. Jörg Ott.

I did my Ph.D. in Collaborative Networking (CoNe) research group at Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Finland in 2019 with Prof. Dr. Jussi Kangasharju. My thesis focused on providing enabling protocols for edge computing.

My thesis has been awarded Outstanding Ph.D. dissertation award 2020 by IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC).

I thoroughly enjoyed my Ph.D. experience! My journey can be summarized with this CoNe group photograph taken in the first year of my Ph.D. (dated Nov, 2016) and this photograph of my after-defense Karonkka with my opponent Prof. Dr. Abhishek Chandra (dated 8^th Nov, 2019).

Interested in knowing what I love working on? Check out Research section below ↡

Recent News

January, 2021	Our paper Surrounded by the Clouds: A Comprehensive Cloud Reachability Study is accepted in The Web Conference (WebConf) 2021 (formerly known as WWW) to be held in Slovenia.
January, 2021	Our paper SPA: Harnessing Availability in the AWS Spot Market is accepted in 3^rd IEEE Infocom Workshop on Intelligent Cloud Computing and Networking to be held virtually.
November, 2020	Maximilian Eder successfully defended his bachelor thesis Analyzing Cloud Reachability on Global Scale. Congratulations Maximilian!
November, 2020	I am serving as a PC member for Edge Computing track of 41^st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 2021
November, 2020	I have been awarded Outstanding Ph.D Dissertation Award 2020 by IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC). The award is highly competitive and celebrates PhD dissertations that make extraordinary research contributions to the field of scalable computing.
October, 2020	The talk for our paper Pruning Edge Research with Latency Shears is now live! Check it out below.
October, 2020	Florian Aschenbrenner successfully defended his bachelor thesis Measuring and Analyzing Multipath TCP support on the Internet. Congratulations Florian!
September, 2020	Gave a talk about our HotNets work in Munich Internet Research Retreat Raitenhaslach (MIR^3). It was my first physical talk of this year.
August, 2020	Our paper Pruning Edge Research with Latency Shears is accepted in ACM Workshop in Hot Topics in Networking (HotNets), 2020 to be held ~~in Chicago, Illinois~~ virtually.
July, 2020	I will be taking the Hot Topics for Edge Computing seminar course in the coming winter semester at TUM.
June, 2020	I am serving as a TPC member for Cloud & Fog/Edge Computing, Networking and Storage track of IEEE Global Communications Conference (Globecom) 2020
May, 2020	I am giving an invited talk of our work "Reality Check for Edge Computing" in EdgeAI webinar organized by 6G Flagship and Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI).
February, 2020	I will be taking the Internet for All seminar course with my colleague Dr. Ljubica Kärkkäinen in the coming summer semester at TUM.
January, 2020	I have changed my banners and have moved countries! From University of Helsinki, Finland ➵ Technical University of Munich, Germany.
January, 2020	Our paper Bricklayer: Resource Composition on the Spot Market is accepted in IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 2020 to be held in Dublin, Ireland
January, 2020	I am reviewing for IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC) 2020
January, 2020	I am serving as a PC member for Edge Computing track of 40^th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 2020
January, 2020	I am reviewing for IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (TNSE) 2020
November, 2019	Successflly defended my Ph.D.! My opponent was Prof. Dr. Abhishek Chandra and my advisor Prof. Dr. Jussi Kangasharju played the role of Custos. You can check out a photo from the defense and the video of my introductory lecture.
November, 2019	I will be defending my Ph.D. soon! Read the University of Helsinki announcement here.
October, 2019	Working as a Teaching Assistant for Distributed Data Infrastructures course. The course details can be found here.
August, 2019	Thank you ACM SIGCOMM for a generous $1100 travel grant to attend ACM Internet and Measurmements Conference (IMC) 2019 to be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
August, 2019	I am now reviewing for IEEE Internet of Things Journal (JIOT) and Elsevier Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal (PMC)
July, 2019	Thank you ACM SIGCOMM for a generous travel grant to attend the physical meeting of Shadow Technical Program Committee (TPC) for ACM Internet and Measurmements Conference (IMC) 2019 to be held in London, UK.
May, 2019	I am serving as a member of Shadow Technical Program Committee (TPC) for ACM Internet and Measurmements Conference (IMC) 2019.
April, 2019	Our paper Open Infrastructure for Edge: A Distributed Ledger Outlook is accepted in 2^nd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Edge Computing (HotEdge) 2019 co-located with USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) to be held in Renton, Washington, USA.
March, 2019	Our paper DeCloud: Truthful Decentralization Double Auction for Edge Clouds is accepted in 39^th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 2019 to be held in Texas, USA.
February, 2019	Our paper ExEC:Elastic Extensible Edge Cloud is accepted in Workshop on Edge Systems, Analytics and Networking (EdgeSys), 2019 co-located with ACM EuroSys to be held in Dresden, Germany.
October, 2018	Working as a Teaching Assistant for Distributed Data Infrastructures course. The course details can be found here.
October, 2018	Our paper ICON: Intelligent Container Overlays is accepted in 17^th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets), 2018 to be held in Washington, USA.
September, 2018	Thank you Microsoft Research for providing a partial travel grant to attend ACM MobiCom 2018 hosted by SIGMOBILE to be held in New Delhi, India.
August, 2018	Our poster Redesigning MPTCP for Edge Clouds is accepted in main proceedings of ACM MobiCom 2018 hosted by SIGMOBILE to be held in New Delhi, India.
June, 2018	Our paper Anveshak: Placing Edge Servers In The Wild is accepted in ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Mobile Edge Communications (MECOMM), 2018 to be co-located with SIGCOMM'2018 to be held in Budapest, Hungary.
May, 2018	Our paper Placing it right!: optimizing energy, processing, and transport in Edge-Fog clouds is accepted in Springer Annals of Telecommunication.
March, 2018	Our paper QAware: A Cross-Layer Approach to MPTCP Scheduling is accepted in IFIP Networking, 2018 to be held in Zurich, Switzerland.
March, 2018	Our paper MUTE: MUlti-Tier Edge networks is accepted in 5^th Workshop on CrossCloud Infrastructures & Platforms to be co-located with EuroSys 2018 to be held in Porto, Portugal.
January, 2018	I am currently working as Visiting Researcher with Prof. Dr. Xiaoming Fu at Institute of Computer Science, University of Göttingen in Germany.
November, 2017	I will be part of the jury for Edge Hackathon being organized. If you are in Helsinki and want to win €2000 while learn more about edge clouds and its applications, feel free to participate!
August, 2017	Working as a Teaching Assistant for Distributed Data Infrastructures course. The course details can be found here.
September, 2017	Attending 3^rd CleanSky Summer School being held in Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
May, 2017	Our paper Managing Data in Computational Edge Clouds is accepted in ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Mobile Edge Communications (MECOMM), 2017 to be co-located with SIGCOMM'2017 to be held in Los Angeles, USA.
April, 2017	Our paper on Caching in Edge-Fog clouds is accepted in CrossCloud workshop to be co-located with EuroSys'17 to be held in Belgrade, Serbia. Please see the publication section for details.
March, 2017	I am currently attending NetSys-2017 conference and 3rd CleanSky ITN conference at Göttingen, Germany. A photo from the event here.
November, 2016	I am currently working as Visiting Researcher with Dr. Fabian Schneider at NEC Labs Europe (NLE) in Germany.
October, 2016	Our Edge-Fog cloud paper has been accepted as full-paper at IEEE CIoT-2016 to be held at Paris. Please see the publication section for details.
September, 2016	Working as a Teaching Assistant for Distributed Systems course. The course details can be found here.
September, 2016	Participated in Aware Machine-to-Machine Communication seminar held at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany. A photo from the event here.
August, 2016	I am attending ACM SIGCOMM 2016 in Florianopolis, Brazil. I had the opportunity to meet ACM Distinguished Prof. Jim Kurose. Our photograph together here.
July, 2016	Participated in 3^rd Helsinki-HKUST-Tsinghua workshop on Mobile services and Edge computing. A photo from the event here.
June, 2016	The 2^nd CleanSky summer school was a huge success! The pictures of the summer school are available on Flickr. A photo of participants at Suomenlinna here.
April, 2016	Working as a Web-Chair for 2^nd CleanSky summer school.
February, 2016	Presented "Edge-Fog Cloud model" at 1^st CleanSky workshop held at NEC Labs, Heidelberg, Germany. A photo of me presenting here.

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Research

I consider myself as a "distributed systems" guy as I have always been involved in various domains (read "avatars") of this field. "Divided we stand, united we fall" is my motto in the context of computer networking research.

Edge Computing

A broad theme of my research explores the physical deployment, specifications and effective utilization of compute resources at the network "edge". The problem is complex primarily due to different requirements imposed by emerging applications. For example, Internet-of-Things need data aggregation, autonomous vehicles require graphical processing, automated industry necessitates task interoperability and AR/VR demands ultra-low network latency. Incorporating such varying application demands to model an always available, semi-managed network of edge servers is something I quite enjoy.

Selected Publications

HotNets '20 EdgeSys '19 MECOMM '18 AoT '17

Next Generation Network Protocols

Emerging applications have significantly changed the way we interact with the underlying network. Our old-yet-faithful protocol, TCP has started to show cracks in performance, especially in cellular and wireless environments. I enjoy exploring and designing next-generation internet protocols which can plug-in several existing performance holes. For this measure, I am interested in working on protocols such as Multipath TCP (MPTCP), 5G and Information Centric Network (ICN).

Selected Publications

IFIP Networking '18 Mobicom '18

Blockchains and Distributed Ledgers

While edge computing has gathered quite a traction in research community, the management and operation of such large semi to fully decentralized compute facilities in real world remains an open question. Blockchains and Distributed Ledgers emerge as a probable technology which can allow edge providers to gain revenue, auction resources and sign service level agreements with application providers. I am currently exploring how this technology can alleviate other open operability issues plaguing real-world deployment of edge clouds.

Selected Publications

ICDCS '19 HotEdge '19

Application & Service Deployment

There is a rapid shift in the make-up of cloud computing as cloud providers try to incorporate edge resources and edge accelerators widely distributed in the region. The brunt of the complexity will be borne by existing cloud-based application as they need to depart from traditional monolithic client-server model. Another aim of my research is to devise intelligent softwarized applications and services which can adapt, adjust and adopt to changes in underlying compute infrastructure without sacrificing performance or quality-of-service.

Selected Publications

ICC '20 HotNets '18

Publications

2020

	Pruning Edge Research with Latency Shears Nitinder Mohan, Lorenzo Corneo, Aleksandr Zavodovski, Suzan Bayhan, Walter Wong, Jussi Kangasharju 19^th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets) Dataset Video DOI
	Bricklayer: Resource Composition on the Spot Market Walter Wong, Lorenzo Corneo, Aleksandr Zavodovski, Pengyuan Zhou, Nitinder Mohan, Jussi Kangasharju 54^th IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) Slides DOI

2019

	Open Infrastructure for Edge: A Distributed Ledger Outlook Aleksandr Zavodovski, Nitinder Mohan, Walter Wong, Jussi Kangasharju 2^nd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Edge Computing (HotEdge), July 2019 Slides DOI
	DeCloud: Truthful Decentralized Double Auction for Edge Clouds Aleksandr Zavodovski, Suzan Bayhan, Nitinder Mohan, Pengyuan Zhou, Walter Wong, Jussi Kangasharju 39^th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) Slides DOI
	ExEC: Elastic Extensible Edge Cloud Aleksandr Zavodovski, Nitinder Mohan, Suzan Bayhan, Walter Wong, Jussi Kangasharju ACM Workshop on Edge Systems, Analytics and Networking (EdgeSys) Slides DOI

2018

	ICON: Intelligent Container Overlays Aleksandr Zavodovski, Nitinder Mohan, Suzan Bayhan, Walter Wong, Jussi Kangasharju 17^th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets) Slides Poster Video DOI
	Redesigning MPTCP for Edge Clouds Nitinder Mohan, Tanya Shreedhar, Aleksandr Zavodovski, Otto Waltari, Jussi Kangasharju, Sanjit K. Kaul 24^th International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom) GitHub Poster SRC Presentation DOI
	Anveshak: Placing Edge Servers In The Wild Nitinder Mohan, Aleksandr Zavodovski, Pengyuan Zhou, Jussi Kangasharju ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Mobile Edge Communications (MECOMM), SIGCOMM GitHub Slides Video DOI
	Placing it right!: Optimizing energy, processing, and transport in Edge-Fog clouds Nitinder Mohan, Jussi Kangasharju Annals of Telecommunication, Springer GitHub DOI
	QAware: A Cross-Layer Approach to MPTCP Scheduling Tanya Shreedhar, Nitinder Mohan, Sanjit K. Kaul, Jussi Kangasharju 17^th IFIP Networking Conference (Networking) GitHub Proceedings DOI
	MUTE: Multi-Tier Edge Networks Alessio Silvestro^, Nitinder Mohan^, Jussi Kangasharju, Fabian Schneider, Xiaoming Fu [ ^joint first authors] 5^th Workshop on CrossCloud Infrastructures & Platforms (CrossCloud*), EuroSys Slides DOI

2017

	Managing Data in Computational Edge Clouds Nitinder Mohan, Pengyuan Zhou, Keerthana Govindaraj, Jussi Kangasharju ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Mobile Edge Communications (MECOMM), SIGCOMM GitHub Slides Video DOI
	Grouping Computational Data in Resource Caches of Edge-Fog Cloud Nitinder Mohan, Pengyuan Zhou, Keerthana Govindaraj, Jussi Kangasharju 4^th Workshop on CrossCloud Infrastructures & Platforms (CrossCloud), EuroSys Conference Poster DOI

2016

Edge-Fog Cloud: A Distributed Cloud for Internet of Things Computations
Nitinder Mohan, Jussi Kangasharju
IEEE International Conference on Cloudification of the Internet of Things (CIoT)

GitHub Slides DOI

2015

CCNCheck: Enabling Checkpointed Distributed Applications in Content Centric Networks
Nitinder Mohan, Pushpendra Singh
4^th CCNx Community Meeting and Conference (CCNxCon), 2015 held at PARC, California, USA

GitHub

Theses

	Edge Computing Platforms and Protocols Ph.D. University of Helsinki, Finland IEEE TCSC Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award 2020 DOI Slides Video BCDC Univ. of Helsinki
	Enabling Sender-initiated Distributed Applications and Checkpointing in Content Centric Networks M.Tech. (CS) with specialization in Mobile Computing (Best Thesis Nominee) Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Delhi, India

Mentoring

I am actively looking for MSc, BSc and Guided Research students enrolled at TUM. I post currently available research topics at the Chair of Connected Mobility webpage. I am also open to explore other interesting topics aligning with my research interests.

= successfully defended

Master Students

2020	Ralf Baun. Self-organizing virtualization technologies for edge service deployments.
2020	Leo Eichhorn. Analyzing practicality of crowdsourced edge computing using blockchains.
2020	Mehdi Yosofi. Flexible multi-cluster edge orchestration and task scheduling platform.

Bachelor Students

2020	The Khang Dang. Analyzing State of Cloud Reachability for Home Users.
2020	Florian Aschenbrenner. Measuring and Analysing MPTCP Support on the Internet.
2020	Maximilian Eder. Analysing Cloud Reachability on Global Scale.

Guided Research

2020	Hendrik Cech. Analysing and Realizing MPTCP Schedulers in Linux.

Service

Program Committee (PC) Member

2021	International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)
2020	IEEE Global Communications Conference (Globecom) International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)
2019	ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) [Shadow]

Reviewer

2020	IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC) IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC) IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (TNSE) Elsevier Pervasive and Mobile Computing (PMC)
2019	IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (TNSE) IEEE Internet of Things Journal (JIOT) Elsevier Pervasive and Mobile Computing (PMC)

Invited Reviewer

2020	IEEE INFOCOM
2019	ACM AIChallengeIoT IEEE ICC NGNI Symposium
2017	ACM ICN

Jury

2017	HackEdge hackathon organized by CEACS

Organizer

2017	3rd CleanSky International Conference
2016	2nd CleanSky Summer School [+Web-Admin]

Teaching

Instructor

2020	Hot Topics in Edge Computing Technical University of Munich
2020	Internet for All Technical University of Munich

Teaching Assistant

2019	Cloud & Edge Computing University of Helsinki
2018	Distributed Data Infrastructures University of Helsinki
2017	Distributed Data Infrastructures University of Helsinki
2016	Distributed Systems University of Helsinki
2015	Cellular Data Networks IIIT Delhi

Guest Lecturer

2018	Introduction to Data Science University of Helsinki

Funding and Support

My research career has been supported by many research projects, grants and organizations. I am truly grateful for their generous support.

Research Projects

01/2020 - Current	Virtual Mobility World (ViM)	Bavarian State Government
03/2019 - 12/2019	Adaptive and Intelligent Data (AIDA)	Academy of Finland
07/2018 - 03/2019	Bright Clouds Dark Clouds (BCDC)	Academy of Finland
08/2015 - 07/2018	Cleansky Initial Training Network	EU FP7 Marie Curie

Monetary Grants

10/2019	Travel grant for Internet Measurements Conference 2019	Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)
07/2019	Travel grant for Shadow PC meeting of Internet Measurements Conference 2019	Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)
11/2018	Travel grant for ACM Mobile Computing & Networking (MobiCom) 2018	Microsoft Research
01/2018 - 05/2018	Visiting Researcher at Computer Network Group, University of Göttingen	European Union
11/2016 - 03/2017	Visiting Researcher at NEC Europe, Heidelberg, Germany	European Union
05/2014	Travel grant for 4^th South Asia Workshop On Research Frontiers In Computing	National University of Singapore

Organizations

I am also very thankful towards several organizations for kindly supporting my research by proving access to their platforms and data.