Hello! I am a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at UC Riverside, CSE Department. I am a cooperating faculty member at ECE department, and am also affiliated to CE-CERT, CRESP, and UCR's Networks, Systems, and Security Lab. My research interests are in the broad area of networking, systems, and cybersecurity, aiming to build performant, intelligent, secure, and resilient networked systems. My recent research specifically targets IoT, 5G, and next-generation wireless networked systems.

Before joining UCR, I was a PostDoctoral Scholar at UCLA, working with Prof. Songwu Lu. I received my Ph.D. degree from the same research group in 2022. Prior to UCLA, I got my BS degree (with honor) in CS from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), under supervision of Prof. Xinbing Wang and Prof. Xiaofeng Gao.

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

What's New

• Dec. 2024: One paper conditionally accepted to MobiCom '25.
• Dec. 2024: Invited to deliver a keynote speech for 5G-MeMU at CoNEXT '24.
• Nov. 2024: Invited to serve on TPC for MobiSys '25. Please consider submitting!
• Sep. 2024: Thank you NSF, for funding our project on 5G diagnostic testing.
• Sep. 2024: Local Arrangement Chair for MobiSys '25 and HotMobile '25. Also served as Student Travel Grant Co-Chair for HotMobile '25.
• Aug. 2024: Co-organizing Open-AI RAN Workshop at MobiCom '24. The workshop will cover exciting topics for next generation O-RAN. Please consider joining us at MobiCom this year.
• Jun. 2024: One paper conditionally accepted to MobiCom '24.
• Jun. 2024: Invited to serve on TPC for INFOCOM '25.
• Mar. 2024: Our study on 911 security is accepted by IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
• 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.

Research Group (GeNeLa)

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

PhD Students

• Sixu Tan (Fall 2023 - )
• Zhutian Liu (Winter 2024 - )
• Harsh Patel (Spring 2024 - )
• Kuangyu Chen (Co-Advise With Srikanth) (Fall 24 - )
• Ruoshen Mo (Co-Advise With Hang) (Fall 24 - )

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

Selected Publications (Complete list)

Underlined names indicate students (co-)advised by me

M2HO: Mitigating the Adverse Effects of 5G Handovers on TCP

Zhutian Liu, Qing Deng, Zhaowei Tan, Zhiyun Qian, Xinyu Zhang, Ananthram Swami, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy
MobiCom '24

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

Zhaowei Tan, Jinghao Zhao, Boyan Ding, Songwu Lu
NSDI '23

Sign-to-911: Enabling 911 Service for Sign Language Users on Assistive AR Glasses

Yunqi Guo, Jinghao Zhao, Boyan Ding, Congkai Tan, Weichong Lin, Zhaowei Tan, Hongzhe Du, Jennifer Miyaki, Songwu Lu.
MobiCom '23

CA++: Enhancing Carrier Aggregation Beyond 5G

Qianru Li, Zhehui Zhang, Yanbing Liu, Zhaowei Tan, Chunyi Peng, Songwu Lu
MobiCom '23

SEED: A SIM-Based Solution to 5G Failures

Jinghao Zhao, Zhaowei Tan, Yifei Xu, Zhehui Zhang, Songwu Lu
SIGCOMM '22

Uncovering Insecure Designs of Cellular Emergency Services (911)

Yiwen Hu, Min-Yue Chen, Guan-Hua Tu, Chi-Yu Li, Sihan Wang, Jingwen Shi, Tian Xie, Xiao Li, Chunyi Peng, Zhaowei Tan, Songwu Lu
MobiCom '22

Device-Based LTE Latency Reduction at the Application Layer

Zhaowei Tan, Jinghao Zhao, Yuanjie Li, Yifei Xu, Songwu Lu
NSDI '21

Data-Plane Signaling in Cellular IoT: Attacks and Defense

Zhaowei Tan, Boyan Ding, Jinghao Zhao, Yunqi Guo, Songwu Lu
MobiCom '21

SecureSIM: Rethinking Authentication and Access Control for SIM/eSIM

Jinghao Zhao, Boyan Ding, Yunqi Guo, Zhaowei Tan, Songwu Lu
MobiCom '21

Experience: A Five-Year Retrospective of MobileInsight

Yuanjie Li, Chunyi Peng, Zhehui Zhang, Zhaowei Tan, Haotian Deng, Jinghao Zhao, Qianru Li, Yunqi Guo, Kai Liang, Boyan Ding, Hewu Li, Songwu Lu
MobiCom '21

Zeus: Locality-aware Distributed Transactions

Antonios Katsarakis, Yijun Ma, Zhaowei Tan, Andrew Bainbridge, Matthew Balkwill, Aleksandar Dragojevic, Boris Grot, Bozidar Radunovic, Yongguang Zhang
Eurosys '21

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

Zhaowei Tan, Yuanjie Li, Qianru Li, Zhehui Zhang, Zhehan Li, Songwu Lu
SIGMETRICS '18

The Tick Programmable Low-Latency SDR System

Haoyang Wu, Tao Wang, Zengwen Yuan, Chunyi Peng, Zhiwei Li, Zhaowei Tan, Boyan Ding, Xiaoguang Li, Yuanjie Li, Jun Liu, Songwu Lu
Mobicom '17

Teaching

CS 169: Mobile Wireless Networks. Winter 2025
CS 179I: Project in Computer Science (Networks). Spring 2024
CS 204: Advanced Computer Networks. Fall 2023
CS 260: Seminar in Computer Science. Fall 2024

Professional Activities

TPC

ACM MobiSys 2025
ACM CoNEXT 2024
IEEE INFOCOM: 2024, 2025
ACM Open-AI RAN 2024
HOLODECKS 2023, 2024

Organizing Committee

ACM MobiSys '25 (Local Arrangement Co-Chair)
ACM HotMobile '25 (Local Arrangement Co-Chair and Student Travel Grant Co-Chair)
ACM CoNEXT '24 (Web Chair and Local Arrangement Co-Chair)
ACM Open-AI RAN 2024 with MobiCom (Publicity Chair)
HOLODECKS '23 '24' (Publicity Chair)
IEEE CNS '23 (Publicity Co-Chair)

Journal Reviewer

IEEE/ACM TNeT, IEEE TMC, IEEE TNSM, IEEE TIFS, IEEE TR
Editor: Proceedings of the ACM on Networking (PACMNET)

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: Software-defined Open NB-IoT Research Platform

Honors

• SIGMOBILE Research Highlights 2022
• 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)