Education Background
Bachelor: Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Normal University, China, 2003
Ph.D: Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, China, 2008
Research Areas
Data Center Networks, Network Intelligence, Trustworthy Internet
Professional Services
Editorial Board Member: IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing
Steering Committee: APNet
Program Committee Co-chair: APNet 2025, IEEE LANMAN 2014
General Co-chair: APNet 2018, IEEE LANMAN 2015
Program Committee Member: ACM SIGCOMM, USENIX NSDI, IEEE ICNP
Awards and Honors
IEEE Fellow, 2025
National Science and Technology Progress Award, First Class, “Next-Generation Internet Source Address Validation Architecture (SAVA): Key Technologies and Large-Scale Applications”, 2024
Technical Invention Award of CIE (China Institute of Electronics), First Class, “Key Technologies and Applications of Performance-Predictable Large-Scale Data Center Networks ”, 2024
Changjiang Scholar of the Ministry of Education, 2021
Youth Science Award of the Ministry of Education, 2019
Technical Invention Award of CIC (China Institute of Communications), First Class, “Multidimensional Perception Based Routing Control Technology for Large-Scale Data Center Networks”, 2019
Research Overview
In the area of data center networks, my research focuses on data center network architecture design, routing protocols, and network programmability. I lead the National 973 Program project “Fundamental Theories and Key Technologies of Software-Defined Cloud Data Center Networks”.
In the area of network intelligence, my research focuses on the bridging between networking and AI, including topology design, network protocol, collective communication, parallel strategies for AI training, as well as AI-driven network operation and optimization. I lead the National Key R&D Program project “Intelligent Routing Control Technology with Network Resource Awareness”.
In the area of trustworthy Internet, my research focuses on source address validation and routing security. I was the leading proponent of the IETF SAVNET working group.
Selected Publications
Conference Papers
[1] Fei Gui, Songtao Wang, Dan Li, Li Chen, Kaihui Gao, Congcong Min and Yi Wang, "RedTE: Mitigating Subsecond Traffic Bursts with Real-time and Distributed Traffic Engineering", ACM SIGCOMM 2024, Sydney, Australia.
[2] Kaihui Gao, Li Chen, Dan Li, Vincent Liu, Xizheng Wang, Ran Zhang and Lu Lu, "DONS: Fast and Affordable Discrete Event Network Simulation with Automatic Parallelization", ACM SIGCOMM 2023, New York, USA.
[3] Shuai Wang, Kaihui Gao, Kun Qian, Dan Li, Rui Miao, Bo Li, Yu Zhou, Ennan Zhai, Chen Sun, Jiaqi Gao, Dai Zhang, Binzhang Fu, Frank Kelly, Dennis Cai, Hongqiang Harry Liu and Ming Zhang, "Predictable vFabric on Informative Data Plane", ACM SIGCOMM 2022, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
[4] Chuanxiong Guo, Guohan Lu, Dan Li, HaitaoWu, Xuan Zhang, Yunfeng Shi, Chen Tian, Yongguang Zhang and Songwu Lu, "BCube: A High Performance, Server-centric Network Architecture for Modular Data Centers", ACM SIGCOMM 2009, Barcelona, Spain.
[5] Fei Gui, Kaihui Gao, Li Chen, Dan Li, Vincent Liu, Ran Zhang, Hongbing Yang and Dian Xiong, "Accelerating Design Space Exploration for LLM Training Systems with Multi-experiment Parallel Simulation", USENIX NSDI 2025, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
[6] Xizheng Wang, Li Chen, Libin Liu, Dan Li, Yukai Miao and Yu Bai, "Resolving Packets from Counters: Enabling Multi-scale Network Traffic Super Resolution via Composable Large Traffic Model", USENIX NSDI 2025, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
[7] Jianmin Liu, Li Chen, Dan Li and Yukai Miao, "CEGS: Configuration Example Generalizing Synthesizer", USENIX NSDI 2025, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
[8] Xizheng Wang , Qingxu Li, Yichi Xu, Gang Lu, Li Chen, Dan Li, Heyang Zhou, Linkang Zheng, Sen Zhang, Yikai Zhu, Yang Liu, Pengcheng Zhang, Kun Qian, Ennan Zhai, Dennis Cai and Binzhang Fu, "SimAI: Unifying Architecture Design and Performance Tunning for Large-Scale Large Language Model Training with Scalability and Precision", USENIX NSDI 2025, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
[9] Tianfeng Liu, Yangrui Chen, Dan Li, Chuan Wu, Yibo Zhu, Jun He, Yanghua Peng, Hongzheng Chen, Hongzhi Chen and Chuanxiong Guo, "BGL: GPU-Efficient GNN Training by Optimizing Graph Data I/O and Preprocessing", USENIX NSDI 2023, Boston, MA, USA.
[10] Yanshu Wang, Dan Li, Yuanwei Lu, Jianping Wu, Hua Shao and Yutian Wang, "Elixir: A High-performance and Low-cost Approach to Managing Hardware/Software Hybrid Flow Tables Considering Flow Burstiness", USENIX NSDI 2022, Virtual.
[11] Kaihui Gao, Chen Sun, Shuai Wang, Dan Li, Yu Zhou, Hongqiang Harry Liu, Lingjun Zhu and Ming Zhang, "Buffer-based End-to-end Request Event Monitoring in the Cloud", USENIX NSDI 2022, Virtual.
[12] Dawei Wang, Geng Zhou, Xianglong Li, Yu Bai, Li Chen, Ting Qin, Jian Sun, Dan Li, "The Digital Cybersecurity Expert: How Far Have We Come?", IEEE S&P 2025, San Francisco, CA, USA.
[13] Dawei Wang, Geng Zhou, Li Chen, Dan Li and Yukai Miao, "ProphetFuzz: Fully Automated Prediction and Fuzzing of High-Risk Option Combinations with Only Documentation via Large Language Model", ACM CCS 2024, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
[14] Lancheng Qin, Dan Li, Ruifeng Li and Kang Wang, "Accelerating the Detection of Route Origin Hijacking by Distinguishing Legitimate and Illegitimate MOAS", USENIX Security 2022, Boston, MA, USA.
[15] Lancheng Qin, Li Chen, Dan Li, Honglin Ye and Yutian Wang, "Understanding ROV Deployment in the Real World and Why MANRS Action 1 Is Not Followed", ISOC NDSS 2024, San Diego, CA, USA.
Journal Papers
[1] Jianmin Liu, Dan Li and Yongjun Xu, "Deep Distributional Reinforcement Learning-based Adaptive Routing with Guaranteed Delay Bounds", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 32(6):4692-4706, 2024.
[2] Kaihui Gao, Shuai Wang, Kun Qian, Dan Li, Rui Miao, Bo Li, Yu Zhou, Ennan Zhai, Chen Sun, Jiaqi Gao, Dai Zhang, Binzhang Fu, Frank Kelly, Dennis Cai, Hongqiang Harry Liu, Yan Li, Hongwei Yang and Tao Sun, "Dependable Virtualized Fabric on Programmable Data Plane", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 31(4):1748-1764, 2023.
[3] Kaihui Gao, Chen Sun, Shuai Wang, Dan Li, Yu Zhou, Hongqiang Harry Liu, Lingjun Zhu, Ming Zhang, Xiang Deng, Cheng Zhou and Lu Lu, "Buffer-based High-coverage and Low-overhead Request Event Monitoring in the Cloud", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 31(4):1732-1747, 2023.
[4] Shuai Wang, Jinkun Geng and Dan Li, "Impact of Synchronization Topology on DML Performance: Both Logical Topology and Physical Topology", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 30(2):572-585, 2022.
[5] Songtao Wang, Dan Li, Yang Cheng, Jinkun Geng, Yanshu Wang, Shuai Wang, Shutao Xia and Jianping Wu, "A Scalable, High-performance and Fault-tolerant Network Architecture for Distributed Machine Learning", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 28(4):1752-1764, 2020.
[6] Xuya Jia, Dan Li, Jing Zhu and Yong Jiang, "Metro: An Efficient Traffic Fast Rerouting Scheme With Low Overhead", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 27(5):2015-2027, 2019.
[7] Guo Chen, Youjian Zhao, Hailiang Xu, Dan Pei and Dan Li, "F2Tree: Rapid Failure Recovery for Routing in Production Data Center Networks", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 25(4):1940-1953, 2017.
[8] Ming Zhu, Dan Li, Fangxin Wang, Anke Li, K.K. Ramakrishnan, Ying Liu, Jianping Wu, Nan Zhu and Xue Liu, "CCDN: Content-Centric Data Center Networks", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 24(6):3537-3550, 2016.
[9] Dan Li, Yirong Yu, Junxiao Shi and Beichuan Zhang, "PALS: Saving Network Power With Low Overhead to ISPs and Applications", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 24(5):2913–2925, 2016.
[10] Dan Li, Jing Zhu, Jianping Wu, Junjie Guan and Ying Zhang, "Guaranteeing Heterogeneous Bandwidth Demand in Multi-tenant Data Center Networks", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 23(5):1648-1660, 2015.
[11] Dan Li, Hongze Zhao, Mingwei Xu and Xiaoming Fu, "Revisiting the Design of Mega Data Centers: Considering Heterogeneity among Containers", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 22(5):1503-1515, 2014.
[12] Dan Li, Yuanjie Li, Jianping Wu, Sen Su and Jiangwei Yu, "ESM: Efficient and Scalable Data Center Multicast Routing", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 20(3):944-955, 2012.
[13] Dan Li, Jianping Wu, Jiangchuan Liu, Yong Cui and Ke Xu, "Defending against Distance Cheating in Link-weighted Application Layer Multicast", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 19(5):1448-1457, 2011.
[14] Dan Li, Chuanxiong Guo, Haitao Wu, Kun Tan, Yongguang Zhang, Songwu Lu and Jianping Wu, "Scalable and Cost-effective Interconnection of Data-center Servers using Dual Server Ports", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 19(1):102-114, 2011.
[15] Dan Li, Yunfei Shang and Congjie Chen, "EXR: Greening Data Center Network with Software Defined Exclusive Routing", IEEE Transactions on Computers, 64(9):2534-2544, 2015.
