Zhaowei is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at UC Riverside, CSE Department. Before joining UCR, he was a PostDoctoral Scholar at UCLA, working with Prof. Songwu Lu. He received his Ph.D. degree from the same research group in 2022. Prior to UCLA, he got his BS degree (with honor) in CS from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), under supervision of Prof. Xinbing Wang and Prof. Xiaofeng Gao.

Zhaowei is broadly interested in system security and resilience, especially for IoT systems that run on 5G and next-generation wireless networks.

[Group]     [Publications]     [Teaching]     [Service]     [Software]     [Honors]    

What's New

• Nov. 2023: Now a cooperating faculty at UCR ECE. I'm looking forward to advising students in ECE. If interested, please kindly mention my name in your application.
• Nov. 2023: Invited to serve as CoNEXT '24 Web Chair and on TPC. Please consider submitting!
• Jun. 2023: One paper conditionally accepted by MobiCom '24.
• Apr. 2023: Invited to serve on the IEEE INFOCOM '24 TPC.
• Apr. 2023: I'm serving as publicity co-chair of CNS '23. The conference will be held in Orlando, FL, USA during Oct 2-5, 2023. Please do consider submitting your work (Deadline: June 12).
• Apr. 2023: LDRP, extension of LRP, has beeny accepted by IEEE TMC.
• Dec. 2022: CellDAM, our solution for 5G data plane attack detection & mitigation will appear in NSDI '23.
• Nov. 2022: Our study on carrier aggregation is conditionally accepted in MobiCom '23.

Research Group (GeNeLa)

I'm fortunate to work with the following talented people.

PhD Students

• Sixu Tan (2023 - )
• Zhutian Liu (2024 - )
• Harsh Patel (2024 - )

If you are interested in working with me, please read this note.

Selected Publications (Complete list)

CellDAM: User-Space, Rootless Detection and Mitigation for 5G Data Plane

Zhaowei Tan, Jinghao Zhao, Boyan Ding, Songwu Lu
NSDI '23
[Paper] [Presentation]

SEED: A SIM-Based Solution to 5G Failures

Jinghao Zhao, Zhaowei Tan, Yifei Xu, Zhehui Zhang, Songwu Lu
SIGCOMM '22
[Paper] [eSIM Loader] [eSIM Applet]

Device-Based LTE Latency Reduction at the Application Layer

Zhaowei Tan, Jinghao Zhao, Yuanjie Li, Yifei Xu, Songwu Lu
NSDI '21
[Paper] [Website] [Slides] [Presentation] [Demo]

Data-Plane Signaling in Cellular IoT: Attacks and Defense

Zhaowei Tan, Boyan Ding, Jinghao Zhao, Yunqi Guo, Songwu Lu
MobiCom '21
[Paper] [1-min Teaser] [Slides]

Supporting Mobile VR in LTE Networks: How Close Are We?

Zhaowei Tan, Yuanjie Li, Qianru Li, Zhehui Zhang, Zhehan Li, Songwu Lu
SIGMETRICS '18
[Paper] [Poster] [Dataset]

Teaching

CS 204: Advanced computer networks. Fall 2023
CS 179I: Project in Computer Science (Networks). Spring 2024

Professional Activities

TPC: IEEE INFOCOM '24, CoNEXT '24
Publicity Co-Chair: IEEE CNS '23
Web Chair: ACM CoNEXT '24
Editor: Proceedings of the ACM on Networking (PACMNET)
Reviewer: IEEE TMC, IEEE TNSM, IEEE TIFS
Shadow PC Committee: EuroSys '23

Software

Flora: Flexible software-defined 4G LTE/5G system
LRP: Reducing mobile network latency at the application layer
MobileInsight: In-phone mobile network analytics
Sonica: Sonica: Software-defined Open NB-IoT Research Platform

Honors

• Mobicom 2022 Best Community Paper Award Runner-Up
• Mobicom 2021 Student Travel Grant
• Summer Mentored Research Fellowship 2021
• NSDI 2021 Student Travel Grant
• SIGMETRICS 2018 Student Travel Grant
• NSF I-Corps Grant
• Mobicom 2017 Best Community Paper Award
• National Scholarship from Ministry of Education of PRC, three times (2013, 2014, 2015)
• Chun-Tsung Scholarship (Funded by Nobel Prize laureate T. D. Lee)