with apologies

Not one but two accepted papers and a Ph.D.

Richard Mortier · March 30, 2025 · #research #academic #phd #publishing

As I find myself once more on a train to parts unknown (to me at least), a brief update :)

The parts unknown in question is Rotterdam, NL (so really quite well-known to quite a lot of people, just not me) for EURO/SYS 2025 (being held jointly with ASPLOS 2025, although I can’t stay for the whole thing unfortunately) and specifically the 3rd International Workshop of Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS).

Why? Happily the programme committee decided to accept two papers from my (ex-)students – which is nice :) The two in question are

  1. Reckon-ing Kubernetes at the Edge using Emulated Clusters with Alessandro Sassi (University of Cambridge / Politecnico di Milano) and Christopher Jensen (University of Cambridge / Microsoft Research). This describes Alessandro’s M.Sc. research project undertaken as a visitor with my group. He built on Chris’ earlier work on Reckon, an emulator setup for examining consensus system behaviour. Alessandor extended this to use ContainerNet enabling it to emulate Kubernetes clusters on a single node, and used this to examine Kubernetes performance in some edge network scenarios. Source available on GitHub at https://github.com/AleSassi/reckon-k8s.

  2. LoRaLive: Efficient LoRaWAN Traffic Generation with Vadim Safronov (University of Oxford / University of Cambridge). This reports a component of Vadim’s Ph.D. work where he built a system to enable dense deployment LoRaWAN trace-playback using a minimal number of nodes while respecting legal constraints on duty cycles. Source available on GitHub at https://github.com/LoRaLive/LoRaLive.

Both nice tools that we hope might be of community interest!

The Ph.D. in question is Chris Jensen’s – happily he passed his viva on Thursday just gone, titled “Separating conflict-recovery from failure-recovery in distributed consensus”, examined by Tim Harris and Aleksey Charapko. Other recent passes include Al-Amjad Tawfiq Isstaif, titled “Contention-resilient overcommitment for serverless deployments” and Andrew Jeffery, titled “Modelling orchestration”. The race1 is now on for the first to tech report…

1

It’s not really a race. That would be weird.