COLLOQUIUM Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina Research Roadmap Driven by Network Benchmarking Lab (NBL): Deep Packet Inspection, Traffic Forensics, WLAN/LTE, Embedded Benchmarking, and Beyond Ying-Dar Lin Department of Computer Science National Chiao Tung University Abstract Most researchers look for topics from the literature. But our research has been driven mostly by development, which in turn has been driven by industrial projects or lab works. We first compare three different sources of research topics. We then derive two research tracks driven by product development and product testing, named the blue track and the green track, respectively. Each track is further divided into a development plane and a research plane. The blue track on product development has fostered a startup company (L7 Networks Inc.) and a textbook (Computer Networks: An Open Source Approach, McGraw-Hill 2011) at the development plane and also a research roadmap on QoS and deep packet inspection (DPI) at the research plane. On the other hand, the green track on product testing has triggered a 3rd-party test bed, Network Benchmarking Lab (NBL, www.nbl.org.tw), at the development plane and a research roadmap on traffic forensics, WLAN/LTE, and embedded benchmarking at the research plane. Throughout this talk, we illustrate how development and research could be highly interleaved. At the end, we give lessons accumulated over the past decade. The audience will see how research could be conducted in a different way. Ying-Dar Lin is Professor of Computer Science at National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA in 1993. He served as the CEO of Telecom Technology Center during 2010-2011 and as a visiting scholar at Cisco Systems in San Jose during 2007–2008. Since 2002, he has been the founding director of Network Benchmarking Lab (NBL, www.nbl.org.tw), which reviews network products with real traffic. He also cofounded L7 Networks Inc. in 2002, which was later acquired by D-Link Corp. He founded Embedded Benchmarking Lab (www.ebl.org.tw) in 2011 to extend into the review of handheld devices. His research interests include design, analysis, implementation, and benchmarking of network protocols and algorithms, quality of services, network security, deep packet inspection, P2P networking, and embedded hardware/software co-design. His work on “multi-hop cellular” was the first along this line, and has been cited over 600 times and standardized into IEEE 802.11s, WiMAX IEEE 802.16j, and 3GPP LTE-Advanced. He was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2013 for his contributions to multi-hop cellular communications and deep packet inspection. He is currently on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Computer, IEEE Network, IEEE Communications Magazine - Network Testing Series, IEEE Wireless Communications, IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, IEEE Communications Letters, Computer Communications, Computer Networks, and IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems. He published the textbook Computer Networks: An Open Source Approach (www.mhhe.com/lin), with Ren-Hung Hwang and Fred Baker (McGraw-Hill, 2011). It is the first text that interleaves open source implementation examples with protocol design descriptions to bridge the gap between design and implementation.