The Networked Systems Group (NSG) is a research group in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET) at ETH Zürich led by Prof. Laurent Vanbever.
Our research revolves around computer networks and complex network management problems. Our overarching goal is to make current and future network infrastructure—especially the Internet—easier to design, understand and operate.
We are currently active in multiple areas including: network verification, network programmability, Internet routing, and network security. Most of our projects are multidisciplinary and involve recent advances in programming languages, algorithmics, and machine learning.
Take a look at our research and publications pages to learn more about our recent research. For a broader overview, check out our latest activity report (2023, 2022, 2021, 2020) or our 1-page research statement.
Our flagship lecture is Communication Networks which we offer in the spring. We also offer a master-level lecture on Advanced Topics in Communication Networks in the fall alongside with a seminar. Check our courses page for more information.
If you are a ETH student interested in doing a project with us, make sure to check out our theses page.
News
I am thrilled to share that we’ve just co-founded NetFabric.ai, the first start-up to come out of our research group! NetFabric is a next-gen network observability platform based on the latest advances in generative AI and mathematical modeling. Our aim? To be the first platform that can provide real-time answers to any networking question. The core founding team comprises our own Tobias Bühler alongside with members of the Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab, including Benjamin Bichsel and Prof. Martin Vechev.
You can expect more updates very soon, including about upcoming student projects in partnership with the startup.
Our paper on quantifiying link sleeping in ISP networks won the Best Paper Award at HotCarbon ‘24.
This is a very nice achievement for our starting research in Sustainable Networking. Congratulations!
Our group welcomes Lukas and Valerio as new team members. Both are “home-grown” students who did multiple projects with us in the past, and we are thrilled they chose to stay with NSG for a few more years.
Welcome!
Our paper on routing attacks against cryptocurrency mining pools has been accepted at IEEE S&P 2024. This marks our return to S&P after a 7-year hiatus. Stay tuned for more updates as we gear up for San Francisco!
2023 was a relatively balanced year for us. Check out our activity report to get a glimpse at what we have been up to and what is in the pipeline in 2024.
Our group welcomes Laurin as new team member. Before starting as a PhD student, Laurin did his master in computer sciences at ETH and worked on serverless architectures and associative caches, amongst others. Welcome!
A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at the Google Networking Summit on some possible applications of machine learning to networking problems. The talk looked in turn at: (i) what kind of models we should learn (hint: transformers-based models); (ii) how we can get our hands on network data to train these models (hint: leveraging big code!); and (iii) how much networking knowledge do large-language models have nowadays (hint: they’re pretty good, actually). You can find the slides here.
Our paper “QVISOR: Virtualizing Packet Scheduling Policies” has been accepted at ACM HotNets 2023! In this work, we ask ourselves: is it possible to simultaneously deploy multiple scheduling algorithms on existing commodity switches? Take a look at the pre-print to find out!
We finally have a new group website with a new design. There is now a full-text search for the publication list (which has grown so large that it is difficult to find a specific publication). And, of course, there is a dark-mode!
Happy to report that our group will again be represented at SIGCOMM this year! Our paper on seamless network configurations, the first avoiding both permanent and transient violations, has just been accepted. As usual, stay tuned for the details! New York City, here we come :-)
