Tianyi Gao

I am Tianyi Gao (高天怡), a PhD student in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Prof. Michio Honda. I completed MSc in Computer Science (Class Prize) at the University of Edinburgh in 2022 with Class Award. I have interned under Prof. Guangyu Sun at the Advanced Institute of Information Technology (AIIT), Peking University in 2020.

My research interests lie in designing high-performance and secure datacenter networking systems. I am currently working on SMT, a datacenter transport protocol with transport-level encryption. SMT is designed as a generic, secure transport that can provide strong confidentiality while maintaining low latency and high throughput for a wide range of datacenter applications. I have also contributed to XO, a framework for remote TCP connection offload that improves scalability and reduces host overhead.

I am a recipient of the IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP).

I am always open to discussions and collaborations on research and open-source projects, please reach out!

news

Jan 14, 2026	🏆 Awarded the IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) 2026!
Apr 22, 2025	SMT and XO are accepted to APNet 2025!

selected publications

APNet’25

Designing Transport-Level Encryption for Datacenter Networks

Tianyi Gao, Xinshu Ma, Suhas Narreddy, Eugenio Luo, Steven W. D. Chien, and Michio Honda

DOI Bib

@inproceedings{10.1145/3735358.3735389,
  author = {Gao, Tianyi and Ma, Xinshu and Narreddy, Suhas and Luo, Eugenio and Chien, Steven W. D. and Honda, Michio},
  title = {Designing Transport-Level Encryption for Datacenter Networks},
  year = {2025},
  isbn = {9798400714016},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3735358.3735389},
  doi = {10.1145/3735358.3735389},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 9th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking},
  pages = {142–149},
  numpages = {8},
  location = {Shanghai, China},
  series = {APNET '25},
}

APNet’25
Remote TCP Connection Offload with XO

Shuo Li^*, Steven W.D. Chien^*, Tianyi Gao, and Michio Honda

Abs DOI Bib

Efficient resource utilization in server clusters is essential for maximizing service capacity and minimizing latency while reducing infrastructure costs, whether in edge clouds or hyperscale deployments. Current approaches face significant limitations: layer 4 load balancing (L4LB) alone causes load imbalance over time with long-lived connections, while layer 7 load balancing (L7LB) introduces substantial CPU, memory, and network overhead despite enabling fine-grained server selection based on application-level requests.This paper presents XO, a set of concept and techniques to enable a TCP server to offload entire TCP connection and application-request processing to another machine at request granularity. Together with L4LB, XO achieves L7LB-level load distribution without the associated overheads.
@inproceedings{10.1145/3735358.3735377, author = {Li, Shuo and Chien, Steven W.D. and Gao, Tianyi and Honda, Michio}, title = {Remote TCP Connection Offload with XO}, year = {2025}, isbn = {9798400714016}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3735358.3735377}, doi = {10.1145/3735358.3735377}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 9th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking}, pages = {37–43}, numpages = {7}, series = {APNET '25}, }