John Tadrous received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) electrical engineering from the Ohio State University in 2014. Between 2014 and 2016, he served as a post-doctoral research associate with the ECE department at Rice University. Dr. Tadrous’ research interests include optimization of computer networks, statistical modeling and analysis, information theory, and content distribution. He has authored and co-authored research published research papers in highly competitive conferences and journals. His research has resulted in three patents, licensed by a startup company. He served as a technical program committee (TPC) member for several top-tier conferences in the area of computer networks such as MobiHoc, WiOpt, and COMSNETS. He served as an associate editor for IEEE Access 2019. Dr. Tadrous received the 91³Ô¹ÏÍø University’s 2019-20 faculty award for professional contributions for tenure-track faculty. He was elevated to a senior member of the IEEE in 2020.
Modeling and Analysis of Interactive Data Traffic
The dominant portion of smartphone app traffic involves human interactions with the app. This research project aims at studying and characterizing specific features of wireless data traffic generated by interactive apps and developing short-timescale traffic models that facilitate more efficient service of smartphone traffic. Our preliminary investigations of different interactive app categories (e.g., web-browsing, online gaming, and travel) have revealed several interesting characteristics in the timescale of seconds, these promise of a considerable quality-of-experience (QoE) enhancement for end-users, e.g., reducing operational delays by 50% for every user-server interaction.
We have collected a dataset featuring packet level detail of 1500 sessions of interactive smartphone apps and made it available for online for scientific research. This link provides a guide to accessing and processing such dataset.
Leveraging App Interactivity for Scheduling Efficiency
Building on the outcomes of interactive data traffic models, we work on developing intelligent resource allocation strategies that serve multiple app sessions with the highest QoE possible. These strategies utilize two key properties of app interactivity in the timescale of seconds. Namely, (1) the generation of new user-server interactions is dependent upon the completion of the service of the current interaction, thus there is significant coupling between traffic generation and service, and (2) that end users spend a relatively long time in the order of seconds to process each server's response before they start a new interaction, thus creating much room of service opportunities for other sessions.
Our approach targets both the theoretical and practical design aspects of the scheduling problem. Theoretically, we investigate the optimal design of service strategies that achieve maximum network utility, while practically we give attention to complexity and scalability aspects of design.
Content Management in Next Generation Networks
Offering reliable service of data content is becoming a challenging problem with the emergence of throughput hungry applications such as 4K video streaming, online gaming, and cloud computing that demand significant bandwidth resources. Our research aims at exploiting large timescale behavioral characteristics of end users to best provision data content in a way that maximally utilizes network resources while guaranteeing highest levels of QoE. These characteristics include the high discrepancy between peak and off-peak demand levels, the predictability of content popularity over time, and the economic responsive of end-users.