Data-Intensive Distributed Systems LaboratoryCS Seminar
Date: April 29th, 2026
Time: 12:50pm
Room: SB111
Dr. Oliver Michel
Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
Illinois Institute of Technology
Talk Title
Building the Infrastructure for the Next Billion Video Calls
Talk Abstract
Over the past years, real-time communication (RTC) applications (including video conferencing, AR/VR, cloud gaming, and remote control) have experienced explosive growth and play an essential role in our society. RTC applications are increasingly complex, latency-sensitive, and resource-hungry. These trends do not only challenge the wide range of networks these applications run over (e.g., campus networks or cellular access networks), but also their core infrastructure that relays media streams among endpoints (e.g., meeting participants). In this talk, I will dissect the most pressing challenges such applications face today and introduce three specific projects aimed at understanding and improving the performance and scalability of RTC applications. First, in Domino, we show how to use cross-layer measurements spanning the intricacies of the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) to the application layer to understand how, today, RTC applications often fail in cellular networks. We reveal specific mismatches between the traffic patterns in RTC applications and the scheduling and capacity-allocation schemes that 5G New Radio employ.
Second, in StreamGuide, we build a practical 5G network system that protects real-time flows through the 5G RAN, maximizing Quality of Experience (QoE) for users while maintaining fairness with non-real-time flows. Finally, in Scallop, we turn to the scalability challenges that operators of these applications face in scaling to millions of concurrent users. We present a novel hardware-software co-design that increases the scalability of the underlying RTC infrastructure by several orders of magnitude.
Speaker Bio
Oliver Michel is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder, advised by Professor Eric Keller, and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Vienna. Prior to joining IIT, he was an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University working with Professor Jennifer Rexford.
His research focuses on measuring and optimizing networks for emerging, low-latency, interactive networked applications, such as AR/VR and video conferencing. His measurement studies and system designs span the entire stack from rich, user-facing applications to the physical-layer intricacies of wireless access networks. Dr. Michel's work has been published in top-tier venues, including SIGCOMM, NSDI, IMC, ATC, and HotNets.