Zhenhua Li (李振华)
Tenured Associate Professor & Ph.D. Advisor, School of Software, Tsinghua University
Research Areas: Mobile Networking, Mobile Virtualization, and Cloud Computing
Email:  lizhenhua1983@gmail.com (primary),  lizhenhua1983@tsinghua.edu.cn (institutional)

Recruitment

Actively recruiting PostDoc researchers and Ph.D./Master students; please see the details. [Nov. 16, 2025]

Research Philosophy

& Current Focus

Understanding fundamental and realistic problems of today's mobile/network/cloud systems at scale, as well as building principled solutions and usable tools to practically address them. Our research has led to actual effect on industrial systems including Alibaba Cloud, Android Cellular Management, Android Emulator, Baidu PhoneGuard, ByteDance Douyin/Toutiao, Tencent App Store, Tencent Game BuddyTencent Offline Downloading, UUSense, WiFi.com, Xiaomi Mobile, Xiaomi OS, etc.

In particular, we strive towards reliable networking under harsh environments (such as highly-heterogenous cellular accesses, high-mobility subway trains, and high-throughput data centers), by means of large-scale characterization, in-depth optimization, and cost-efficient virtualization. Harsh environments stress every piece of the communication chain, and thus are where users suffer the most and reliability matters the most. In other words, it is in harsh environments that a network design is truly proven.


Representative Work on Mobile Networking

[SIGCOMM'21 Best Student Paper Award] A Nationwide Study on Cellular Reliability: Measurement, Analysis & Enhancements

[MobiCom'22 Best Community Paper Award] Experience: Practical Indoor Localization for Malls

[SIGCOMM'22] Mobile Access Bandwidth in Practice: Measurement, Analysis, and Implications

[NSDI'21] Fast and Light Bandwidth Testing for Internet Users

[MMSys'17 Best Student Paper Award] A Measurement Study of Oculus 360 Degree Video Streaming


Representative Work on Mobile Virtualization

[SOSP'24] vSoC: Efficient Virtual System-on-Chip on Heterogeneous Hardware

[MobiCom'23] Virtual Device Farms for Mobile App Testing at Scale: A Pursuit for Fidelity, Efficiency, and Accessibility

[OSDI'22] Trinity: High-Performance Mobile Emulation through Graphics Projection

[MobiCom'19 Best Demo Award] Mobile Gaming on Personal Computers with Direct Android Emulation


Representative Work on Cloud Computing

[SIGCOMM'25] SkeletonHunter: Diagnosing and Localizing Network Failures in Containerized Large Model Training

[NSDI'25] Mitigating Scalability Walls of RDMA-based Container Networks

[NSDI'25] Dissecting and Streamlining the Interactive Loop of Mobile Cloud Gaming

[IEEE Trans. Cloud Computing'15 Best Paper] CHARM: A Cost-efficient Multi-cloud Data Hosting Scheme w/ High Availability


Summary of Publications Two books: (1) Content Distribution for Mobile Internet: A Cloud-based Approach, 2nd Edition, Feb. 2023 [full pdf download];  (2) Peer-to-Peer Network: Structure, Application and Design, Sep. 2007, 105 citations [Pre][Ch1][Ch5][Ch9

60+ papers on recognized conferences (SIGCOMM*3, NSDI*4, OSDI*2, SOSP, MobiCom*7, MobiSys*3, EuroSys*2, FAST*2, CoNEXT, SIGMetrics, IMC*3, USENIX Security, NDSS, ASE, WWW*2, MM*5, INFOCOM*10, UbiComp) and journals (TMC*11, TON*9, TPDS*7, TOMM*3, TCC*2, TDSC*2, TIFS, TOS, TOCS, TOMPECS, TOSN)


Academic Services in Recent Years Leading Associate Editor of Tsinghua Science and Technology (SCI impact factor: 5.2) in Network and System areas, and Leading Guest Editor of Tsinghua Science and Technology for the Special Issue on TURC Cutting-Edge Intelligence.

♦ Organizing Committee Member of MSN'26 (PC Co-Chair), APNet'24 (Publicity Co-Chair), CCFsys'23 (PC Co-Chair), SIGCOMM China'23 (PC Co-Chair), and SIGCOMM China'19 (PC Co-Chair)

♦ Program Committee Member of INFOCOM'26, MM'25, WWW'25, INFOCOM'25, INFOCOM'24 (Distinguished PC Member), MM'24 (Outstanding Reviewer), INFOCOM'23 (Distinguished PC Member), INFOCOM'22, INFOCOM'21 (Distinguished PC Member), and INFOCOM'20 (Distinguished PC Member)


Career & Education:
2023.1 - now         Tenured Associate Professor & Ph.D. Advisor @ School of Software, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
2018.12 - 2022.12 Tenure-Track Associate Professor & Ph.D. Advisor @ School of Software, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
2015.11 - 2018.11 Assistant Professor & Ph.D. Advisor @ School of Software, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
2013.7 - 2015.10   PostDoc @ School of Software, Tsinghua University, Advisor: Prof. Yunhao Liu (ACM/IEEE Fellow)
2009.6 - 2013.6     Ph.D. @ School of EECS, Peking University, Beijing, China, Advisor: Prof. Yafei Dai
2011.9 - 2012.9     Visiting Student @ University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Advisor: Prof. Zhi-Li Zhang (IEEE Fellow)
2011.9 - 2012.9     Christianity study @ Stadium Village Church, Minneapolis, Tutor: Robert & Joanne Kraftson
2008.6 - 2009.4     Software Engineer @ Marvell Technologies (Shanghai) Co. Ltd
2007.5 - 2007.10   Research Assistant @ Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Advisor: Prof. Jiannong Cao (IEEE Fellow)
2001.9 - 2008.6     Bachelor & Master @ Dept. of Computer, Nanjing University, Advisor: Prof. Guihai Chen (IEEE Fellow)

Awards:
2025 Outstanding Contribution Award of Tsinghua Science and Technology(《清华学报(英文版)》 杰出贡献奖)
2024 ACM China Doctoral Dissertation Award, Supervisor(ACM中国优博奖,指导教师)
2024 Outstanding Reviewer of ACM Multimedia
2024 Distinguished PC Member of IEEE INFOCOM
2024 Cover Article of JCRD January Issue(《 计算机研究与发展》1月刊封面文章)
2023 Distinguished PC Member of IEEE INFOCOM
2022 Excellent Scientific Researcher of the School of Software, Tsinghua University(清华大学软件学院科研先进个人)
2022 CCF-IEEE CS Young Computer Scientist Award(中国计算机学会青年科技奖)
2022 Best Community Paper Award of ACM MobiCom
2021 Best Student Paper Award of ACM SIGCOMM
2021 Cover Article of CJICT April Issue(《中国教育信息化》4月刊封面文章)
2021 Distinguished PC Member of IEEE INFOCOM (and Session Chair for Web Systems)
2020 Distinguished PC Member of IEEE INFOCOM (and Session Chair for Video Streaming)
2019 Best Demo Award of ACM MobiCom
2019 Excellent Paper Award of Tsinghua Science and Technology(《清华学报(英文版)》优秀论文奖)
2019 Cover Article of SCIENTIA SINICA Informationis(《中国科学:信息科学》9月刊封面文章)
2018 National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars(国家自然科学优秀青年基金)
2017 Best Student Paper Award of ACM MMSys
2017 Cover Article of Tsinghua Science and Technology(《清华学报(英文版)》2月刊封面文章)
2016 Excellence Award of CCF-Tencent Rhino-bird Open Fund(CCF-腾讯犀牛鸟科研基金优秀奖)
2015 Best Paper and Spotlight Paper of IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (Jul-Sep Issue)
2015  First Prize of Natural Sciences, Ministry of Education(教育部自然科学奖一等奖)
2015 CAAI Doctoral Thesis Award(中国人工智能学会优秀博士学位论文奖)
2014 Cover Article of CCCF August Issue(《中国计算机学会通讯》8月刊封面文章)
2009 First Prize of China University Press Award(中国大学出版社图书奖一等奖 )
2009 Master Thesis Award of Jiangsu Province(江苏省优秀硕士学位论文奖)

Important Work in Past Ten Years:

Our paper in ASE'25 -- Democratizing the Cryptocurrency Ecosystem by Just-In-Time Transformation of Mining Programs [ppt][poster][code/data]

Our paper in SIGCOMM'25 -- SkeletonHunter: Diagnosing and Localizing Network Failures in Containerized Large Model Training [ppt][video][code/data][Alibaba Cloud adoption]

Our paper in OSDI'25 -- Fast and Synchronous Crash Consistency with Metadata Write-Once File System [ppt][code/data]

Two papers in NSDI'25 -- (1) Interactive Loop of Mobile Cloud Gaming [ppt][code/data]  (2) Mitigating Scalability Walls of Container Networks [ppt][code/data][Alibaba Cloud adoption]

Two papers in MobiCom'24 -- (1) Rethinking Process Management for Interactive Mobile Systems [ppt][code/data][MIUI OS adoption]  (2) MuV2: Multi-user Volumetric Video [ppt]

Our paper in SOSP'24 -- vSoC: Efficient Virtual System-on-Chip on Heterogeneous Hardware [ppt][code][Huawei DevEco Studio adoption]

Our paper in MobiCom'23 -- Virtual Device Farms for Mobile App Testing at Scale: A Pursuit for Fidelity, Efficiency, and Accessibility [ppt][code/data][ByteDance adoption][Google adoption]

Two papers in MM'23 -- (1) SkipStreaming: Redundancy-free Video Streaming [code/data/demo]  (2) ParliRobo: Participant Light AI Robots [code/data/demo][ByteDance adoption]

Our paper in WWW'23 -- Visual-Aware Testing and Debugging for Web Performance Optimization [ppt][video][code/data]

Best Community Paper Award in MobiCom'22 -- Experience: Practical Indoor Localization for Malls [ppt][video][data][news][Hangzhou XYZ10 Technology adoption]

Our paper in SIGCOMM'22 -- Mobile Access Bandwidth in Practice: Measurement, Analysis, and Implications [ppt][poster][video][code/data][public review][UUSpeedTest adoption][TMC'25]

Our paper in OSDI'22 -- Trinity: High-Performance Mobile Emulation through Graphics Projection [ppt][poster][video][code/data][Huawei DevEco Studio adoption][TOCS'24]

Our paper in SIGMetrics'22 -- Fusing Speed Index during Web Page Loading [ppt][video][code/data]

Our paper in MobiCom'21 -- A Nationwide Census on WiFi Security Threats: Prevalence, Riskiness, and the Economics [ppt][poster][video][teaser][WiFi.com adoption]

Best Student Paper Award in SIGCOMM'21 -- A Nationwide Study on Cellular Reliability: Measurement, Analysis, and Enhancements [ppt][video][code][review][news][Google adoption]

Our paper in NSDI'21 -- Fast and Light Bandwidth Testing for Internet Users [ppt][poster][video][code][online system][TON'23 version]

Our paper in MobiCom'20 -- Experience: Aging or Glitching? Why Does Android Stop Responding and What Can We Do About It? [ppt][video][code/data][MIUI OS adoption][TMC'24]

Our paper in EuroSys'20 -- Experiences of Landing Machine Learning onto Market-Scale Mobile Malware Detection [ppt][poster][video][code/data][Tencent App Store adoption][TPDS'21]

Our paper in FAST'20 -- Lock-Free Collaboration Support for Cloud Storage Services with Operation Inference & Transformation [ppt][poster][code/data][TPDS'22 version]

Our paper & Best Demo Award in MobiCom'19 -- Mobile Gaming on Personal Computers with Direct Android Emulation [ppt][poster][demo][video][Tencent Game Buddy adoption]

Three papers in MobiSys'19 -- (1) HoneyCloud [ppt][code/data]  (2) Tencent OverlayChecker [ppt][data][TMC'22 version]  (3) Xiaomi MVNO [ppt][TON'20 version][Xiaomi Mobile adoption]

My paper in TOMPECS'19 -- A Quantitative and Comparative Study of Network-level Efficiency for Cloud Storage Services [IMC'14 version][ppt][data][data collector]

Our paper in FAST'18 -- Towards Web-based Delta Synchronization for Cloud Storage Services [ppt][poster][code][news report][TOS'22 version]

Best Student Paper Award in ACM MMSys'17 -- A Measurement Study of Oculus 360 Degree Video Streaming [ppt][code][TOMM'18 version]

My paper in NDSS'17 -- FBS-Radar: Uncovering Fake Base Stations at Scale in the Wild [ppt][presentation][Baidu PhoneGuard adoption][news report]

Cover Article & Excellent Paper Award in JTST'17 (SCI journal) -- Towards A Full-Stack DevOps Environment (PaaS) for Cloud-Hosted Applications

My paper in NSDI'16 -- Exploring Cross-Application Cellular Traffic Optimization with Baidu TrafficGuard [ppt][Baidu PhoneGuard adoption]

My paper in IMC'15 -- Offline Downloading in China: A Comparative Study [ppt][Tencent Offline Downloading adoption][news report]

Best Paper and Spotlight Paper in IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, 2015 -- CHARM: A Cost-efficient Multi-cloud Data Hosting Scheme with High Availability [video]