I am a PhD candidate at Telecommunication Research Lab, School of Computing, Queen's University since 2007. My research interests are in the area of multimedia communication, peer-to-peer networks, Internet infrastructure and applications, and telecom networks.

Thesis

Title: A Study of Traffic Locality and Reliability in Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming Applications Get it @ Queen's

For P2P video live streaming and multimedia communications applications, smoothness and timeliness of the playback are the two most important aspects to users' viewing experience, while the amount of network traffic is the main concern of ISPs. Live streaming applications usually can tolerate a playback delay of several seconds to several minutes, while the delay must be within several hundred milliseconds for interactive streaming and multimedia communications applications. The goal of my research is to reduce the Internet traffic generated by P2P live streaming applications and to reduce the packet loss rate in P2P live streaming and multimedia communications applications while keeping the delays well below the bounds the targeted application can tolerate.

Publications

Journals

  1. X. Zhang and H. Hassanein, "A survey of peer-to-peer video live streaming schemes—an algorithmic perspective,” Elsevier's Computer Networks, vol. 56, no. 15, pp. 3548–3579, 2012.
  2. X. Zhang and H. Hassanein, “Understanding the impact of neighboring strategy in peer-to-peer multimedia streaming applications,” Elsevier's Computer Communications, vol. 35, no. 15, pp. 1893–1901, 2012.
  3. A. Mawji, H. Hassanein, and X. Zhang, “Peer-to-peer overlay topology control for mobile ad hoc networks,” Elsevier's Pervasive and Mobile Computing, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 467–478, 2011.

Conferences

  1. X. Zhang, Glen Takahara, and H. Hassanein, “Reliable interactive video streaming in peer-to-peer networks,” in Proc. Consumer Communication and Networking Conf. (CCNC) Special Session on Multimedia Content Distribution Networks, 2012, pp. 768-773.
  2. X. Zhang and H. Hassanein, “On network utilization of peer-to-peer video live streaming on the internet,” in Proc. Int. Conf. On Communications (ICC), 2011, pp. 1–5.
  3. X. Zhang and H. Hassanein, “A neighboring strategy for ISP-friendly peer-to-peer video live streaming,” in Proc. Int. Conf. On Communications (ICC), 2011, pp. 1–5.
  4. X. Zhang and H. Hassanein, “Treeclimber: A network-driven push-pull hybrid scheme for peer-to-peer video live streaming,” in Proc. Local Computer Networks (LCN), 2010, pp. 368–371.
  5. X. Zhang and H. Hassanein, “Video on-demand streaming on the Internet–a survey,” in Queen's Biennial Symposium on Communications (QBSC), 2010, pp. 88–91.

Courses

The School of Computing, Queen's University, requires Ph.D. students to take four or five courses for credit in fulfillment of the requirements of the Ph.D. degree. I took five courses for credit because my master's degree was in electrical engineering rather than computer science. In addition, I audited three courses which I thought would be most beneficial. I also sit in class for several other courses, such as graph theory and high-performance computing. The following is a list of courses that I attended in full.

1. Stochastic Process. Instructor: Dr. Glen Takahara

Probability models, Markov chains, etc., which are indispensible for network analysis. I was thrilled by Dr. Takahara's logical thinking and later sought his help with two of my papers.

2. Data Networks. Instructor: Dr. Glen Takahara

Use stochastic processes to analyze delay models and multiple access systems such as CSMA/CD and CSMA/CA.

3. IP Networks: Traffic and QoS Management. Instructor: Dr. Hossam Hassanein

I am mainly inteseted in various flavors of TCP. I also did some research on QoS routing.

4. Language Theory. Instructor: Dr. Bob Tennent

Denotational semantics of programming languages. This is a pretty hard course. To catch up the necessary background, I self-studied lambda calculus, Hoare logic, predicate logic, etc.

5. Programming Language Processors. Instructor: Dr. Jim Cordy

Construction of compilers. I got a chance to modify a Pascal compiler to add some features. The compiler is written in C, which is one of the most beautiful code I have ever seen.

6. Software Security and Reliability. Instructor: Dr. Mohammad Zulkernine

Software process models, reliability engineering, security engineering, etc. The fun part is the course project: I used data mining techniques to filter out spam emails from my gmail account. The false positive/negative rate is similar as gmail's filter.

7. Data Mining. Instructor: Dr. David Skillicorn

Hands-on experience of data mining techniques. We were given several sets of data and tried to extract meanings from them using all the means we have.

8. Fuzzy Logic. Instructor: Dr. Robin Dawes

Introduction to the fuzzy set theory, which was made popular by Japanese washing machines.

9. Principles of Academic Writing. Instructor: Dr.Rosalind Malcolm

Contact

Mailing Address:
School of Computing
25 Union Street, Goodwin Hall
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6
Canada

tel: +1 613 533 6000 ext 75103
email: xiang at cs dot queensu dot ca
COPYRIGHT © 2011, XIANGYANG ZHANG. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.