WolfPack: Application-Network Co-Design for Edge Resource Provisioning

This project is supported by NSF CAREER Award #2045539 (2021/07/01-2026/06/30):

Project Description
Modern distributed computing applications have extremely complex structures. Examples include microservice-based applications such as Twitter, Netflix, Uber, and IoT, which can consist of thousands of microservices, loosely coupled through API calls. Such structural complexity poses significant challenges when these applications are looking to leverage edge computing, our next-gen computing paradigm, which provides low-latency and high-throughput computing proximal to end users. This project addresses the performance issue of large-scale distributed applications by employing an application-network co-design approach: simultaneously configuring computing and networking resources for end-to-end performance guarantee. Two developments will result from this project: the WolfPack, a theoretical framework for app-network co-design optimization; and the WolfBench, a systematic benchmark for app-network co-designed applications in realistic edge computing environments.
Personnel

Dr. Ruozhou Yu
PI@NCSU		 Graduate Students
Zhouyu Li (PhD student @ NCSU)
Fangtong Zhou (PhD student @ NCSU)
Xiaojian Wang (PhD student @ NCSU)
Huayue Gu (PhD student @ NCSU)

Undergraduate Students
Xiaochun Liang (UG student @ NCSU)
Jordan Robertson (UG student @ NCSU)
Kagwe Muchane (UG student @ NCSU)
Publications and Pre-prints
  • Enforcing Service Level Agreements with Verifiability and Privacy in Pervasive Edge Computing Environments
    Xiaojian Wang, Ruozhou Yu, Dejun Yang, Huayue Gu, Zhouyu Li,
    IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), vol. 25, no. 10, pp. 18342-18356, 2026.
  • Traffic Engineering in Large-scale Networks with Generalizable Graph Neural Networks [arXiv]
    Fangtong Zhou*, Sihao Liu*, Xiaorui Liu, Ruozhou Yu, Guoliang Xue,
    IEEE Transactions on Networking (ToN), vol. 34, pp. 3137-3149, 2026. (Zhou and Liu contributed equally to this paper)
  • Cost-Aware High-Fidelity Entanglement Distribution and Purification in the Quantum Internet
    Huayue Gu*, Zhouyu Li*, Xiaojian Wang*, Dejun Yang, Guoliang Xue, Ruozhou Yu,
    IEEE Transactions on Networking (ToN), vol. 34, pp. 681-696, 2026. (Gu and Li contributed equally to this paper)
  • Wormholes in Space: Unveiling Wormhole Attack in Low Earth Orbit Satellite Networks
    Xiaojian Wang, Ruozhou Yu, Dejun Yang,
    In IEEE International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC), pp. 491-497, 2026.
  • OrbitChain: Orchestrating In-orbit Real-time Analytics of Earth Observation Data [arXiv]
    Zhouyu Li*, Zhijin Yang, Huayue Gu*, Xiaojian Wang, Yuchen Liu, Ruozhou Yu
    arXiv: 2508.13374v3, pp. 1-18, 2026.
  • Moving Edge for On-Demand Edge Computing: An Uncertainty-aware Approach [arXiv]
    Fangtong Zhou*, Ruozhou Yu,
    arXiv: 2503.24214, pp. 1-12, 2025.
  • SA2FE: A Secure, Anonymous, Auditable, and Fair Edge Computing Service Offloading Framework [arXiv]
    Xiaojian Wang*, Huayue Gu*, Zhouyu Li*, Fangtong Zhou*, Ruozhou Yu, Dejun Yang, Guoliang Xue,
    arXiv: 2504.20260, pp. 1-12, 2025.
  • Space Booking: Enabling Performance-Critical Applications in Broadband Satellite Networks [PDF]
    Xiaojian Wang*, Ruozhou Yu, Dejun Yang, Guoliang Xue, Qiushi Wei, Huayue Gu*, Zhouyu Li*,
    In IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), pp. 989-999, 2025.
  • Physics-Informed Mixed-Criticality Scheduling for F1Tenth Cars with Preemptable ROS 2 Executors [PDF]
    Kurt Wilson, Abdullah Al Arafat, John Baugh, Ruozhou Yu, Zhishan Guo,
    In IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS), pp. 215-227, 2025.
  • Mi-Co: Models and Algorithms for Cost-efficient Entanglement Distribution in the Quantum Internet [PDF]
    Huayue Gu*, Zhouyu Li*, Xiaojian Wang*, Dejun Yang, Guoliang Xue, Ruozhou Yu,
    In IEEE International Conference on Quantum Communications, Networking, and Computing (QCNC), pp. 339-346, 2025.
  • AdaOrb: Adapting In-Orbit Analytics Models for Location-aware Earth Observation Tasks [PDF] [Slides]
    Zhouyu Li*, Pinxiang Wang*, Xiaochun Liang*, Xuanhao Luo, Yuchen Liu, Xiaojian Wang*, Huayue Gu*, Ruozhou Yu,
    In IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), pp. 208-214, 2025.
  • QuESat: Satellite-Assisted Quantum Internet for Global-Scale Entanglement Distribution [arXiv]
    Huayue Gu*, Ruozhou Yu, Zhouyu Li*, Xiaojian Wang*, Guoliang Xue,
    In IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), pp. 1-10, 2025.
  • Infiltrating the Sky: Data Delay and Overflow Attacks in Earth Observation Constellations [Extend Version]
    Xiaojian Wang*, Ruozhou Yu, Dejun Yang, Guoliang Xue,
    In IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), pp. 1-11, 2024.
  • FENDI: Toward High-Fidelity Entanglement Distribution in the Quantum Internet [arXiv]
    Huayue Gu*, Zhouyu Li*, Ruozhou Yu, Xiaojian Wang*, Fangtong Zhou*, Jianqing Liu, Guoliang Xue,
    IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 5033-5048, 2024. (Gu and Li contributed equally to this paper)
  • VeriEdge: Verifying and Enforcing Service Level Agreements for Pervasive Edge Computing
    Xiaojian Wang*, Ruozhou Yu, Dejun Yang, Huayue Gu*, Zhouyu Li*,
    In IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), pp. 2149-2158, 2024.
  • Thor: A Virtual Payment Channel Network Construction Protocol over Cryptocurrencies
    Qiushi Wei, Dejun Yang, Ruozhou Yu, Guoliang Xue
    In IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), pp. 771-780, 2024.
  • Fence: Fee-based Online Balance-aware Routing in Payment Channel Networks
    Xiaojian Wang*, Ruozhou Yu, Dejun Yang, Guoliang Xue, Huayue Gu*, Zhouyu Li*, Fangtong Zhou*,
    IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 1661-1676, 2024.
  • INSPIRE: Instance-level Privacy-preserving Transformation for Vehicular Camera Videos
    Zhouyu Li*, Ruozhou Yu, Anupam Das, Shaohu Zhang, Huayue Gu*, Xiaojian Wang*, Fangtong Zhou*, Aafaq Sabir, Dilawer Ahmed, Ahsan Zafar
    In IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), pp. 1-10, 2023.
  • EA-Market: Empowering Real-Time Big Data Applications with Short-Term Edge SLA Leases
    Ruozhou Yu, Huayue Gu*, Xiaojian Wang*, Fangtong Zhou*, Guoliang Xue, Dejun Yang
    In IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), pp. 1-10, 2023.
  • Principles and Practices for Application-Network Co-Design in Edge Computing
    Ruozhou Yu, Guoliang Xue
    IEEE Network, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 137-144, 2023.
  • FedAegis: Edge-Based Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Data [PDF]
    Fangtong Zhou*, Ruozhou Yu, Zhouyu Li*, Huayue Gu*, Xiaojian Wang*,
    In IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), pp. 3005-3010, 2022.
  • Data-Driven Edge Resource Provisioning for Inter-Dependent Microservices with Dynamic Load
    Ruozhou Yu, Szu-Yu Lo*, Fangtong Zhou*, Guoliang Xue
    In IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), pp. 1-6, 2021.
  • Edge-Assisted Collaborative Perception in Autonomous Driving: A Reflection on Communication Design
    Ruozhou Yu, Dejun Yang, Hao Zhang
    In IEEE/ACM Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC), pp. 371-375, 2021.
Datasets and Artifacts
  • C-V2X NS-3 simulator with collaborative perception [GitHub]
  • Benchmarking Microservice-based Application: code, data and figures [GitHub]
  • Large-scale GNN-based traffic engineering: [GitHub]