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).

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

Recent News

February, 2021/td> Mehdi Yosofie successfully defended his master thesis Flexible Multi-Cluster Edge Orchestration and Task Scheduling Platform. Congratulations Mehdi!
February, 2021 I will be taking the Human-Centric Netwoking seminar course with my colleague Leonardo Tonetto in the coming summer semester at TUM.
January, 2021 I am serving as a PC member for Workshop on Intelligent Things and Services (InThings) jointly held with IEEE WoWMoM 2021 . Please consider submitting your work there.
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 3rd 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 41st 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 40th 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 2nd 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 39th 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 17th 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 5th 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 3rd 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 3rd Helsinki-HKUST-Tsinghua workshop on Mobile services and Edge computing. A photo from the event here.
June, 2016 The 2nd 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 2nd CleanSky summer school.
February, 2016 Presented "Edge-Fog Cloud model" at 1st 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

2021
Surrounded by the Clouds: A Comprehensive Cloud Reachability Study
Lorenzo Corneo, Maximilian Eder, Nitinder Mohan, Aleksandr Zavodovski, Suzan Bayhan, Walter Wong, Per Gunningberg, Jussi Kangasharju, Jörg Ott
30th The Web Conference (WebConf) [Formerly WWW]

Code   Dataset   DOI

SPA: Harnessing Availability in the AWS Spot Market
Walter Wong, Aleksandr Zavodovski, Lorenzo Corneo, Nitinder Mohan, Jussi Kangasharju
IEEE INFOCOM Workshop on Intelligent Cloud Computing and Networking (ICCCN)

2020
Pruning Edge Research with Latency Shears
Nitinder Mohan, Lorenzo Corneo, Aleksandr Zavodovski, Suzan Bayhan, Walter Wong, Jussi Kangasharju
19th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets)

Dataset   Slides   Video   DOI

Bricklayer: Resource Composition on the Spot Market
Walter Wong, Lorenzo Corneo, Aleksandr Zavodovski, Pengyuan Zhou, Nitinder Mohan, Jussi Kangasharju
54th 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
2nd 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
39th 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
17th 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
24th International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom)

Code   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

Code   Slides   Video   DOI

Placing it right!: Optimizing energy, processing, and transport in Edge-Fog clouds
Nitinder Mohan, Jussi Kangasharju
Annals of Telecommunication, Springer

Code   DOI

QAware: A Cross-Layer Approach to MPTCP Scheduling
Tanya Shreedhar, Nitinder Mohan, Sanjit K. Kaul, Jussi Kangasharju
17th IFIP Networking Conference (Networking)

Code   Proceedings   DOI

MUTE: Multi-Tier Edge Networks
Alessio Silvestro*, Nitinder Mohan*, Jussi Kangasharju, Fabian Schneider, Xiaoming Fu   [ *joint first authors]
5th 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

Code   Slides   Video   DOI

Grouping Computational Data in Resource Caches of Edge-Fog Cloud
Nitinder Mohan, Pengyuan Zhou, Keerthana Govindaraj, Jussi Kangasharju
4th 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)

Code   Slides   DOI

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

Code

Theses
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
2021 Hendrik Cech. Using Multipath TCP for Remote Piloting Aerial Vehicles.
2021 Ralf Baun. Realizing self-organizing platforms for edge service deployments.
2021 Leo Eichhorn. Exploring latency boundaries of blockchains in edge computing networks.
2020 Mehdi Yosofie. 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.
Published in WebConf-2021
Guided Research
2020 Hendrik Cech. Analysing and Realizing MPTCP Schedulers in Linux.

Teaching

Instructor
2021 Human Centric Networks Technical University of Munich
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 4th 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.