I am a Senior Researcher in the Networking Infrastructure Group at Microsoft Research Asia. Prior to this, I completed my Ph.D. at the Department of Computer Science at the City University of Hong Kong in 2019.

My research is primarily concentrated on systems and networking (AI, cloud, and wide area), with a strong emphasis on deploying these technologies in real-world production environments to address practical challenges.

Service

• Program Committee, IEEE ICDCS 2025
• Organizer, Grand Challenge on Offline Reinforcement Learning for Bandwidth Estimation in Real Time Communications, ACM MMSys 2024
• Program Committee, IEEE ICDCS 2024
• Program Committee, IEEE ICDCS 2023
• Organizer, Grand Challenge on Bandwidth Estimation for Real-Time Communications, ACM MMSys 2021

Selected Publications

* = Equal contribution

[ACM SIGMETRICS ‘25] Revisiting Traffic Splitting for Software Switch in Datacenter
Yeonho Yoo, Gyeongsik Yang, Changyong Shin, Hwiju Cho, Wonmi Choi, Zhixiong Niu, Chuck Yoo

[USENIX FAST ‘25] 3L-Cache: Low Overhead and Precise Learning-based Eviction Policy for Web Caches
Wenbin Zhou, Zhixiong Niu, Yongqiang Xiong, Juan Fang, and Qian Wang

[ACM ASPLOS ‘25] Performance Prediction of On-NIC Network Functions with Multi-Resource Contention and Traffic Awareness
Shaofeng Wu*, Qiang Su*, Zhixiong Niu, and Hong Xu

[IEEE INFOCOM ‘25] MINA: Fine-grained In-network Aggregation Resource Scheduling for Machine Learning Service
Shichen Dong, Zhixiong Niu, Mingchao Zhang, Zhiying Xu, Chuntao Hu, Pengzhi Zhu, Qingchun Song, Lei Qu, Peng Cheng, Cam-Tu Nguyen, Shaoling Sun, Xiaohu Xu, Yongqiang Xiong, Wei Wang, and Xiaoliang Wang

[ACM CONEXT ‘22] PipeDevice: A Hardware-Software Co-Design Approach to Intra-Host Container Communication
Qiang Su, Chuanwen Wang, Zhixiong Niu, Ran Shu, Peng Cheng, Yongqiang Xiong, Dongsu Han, Chun Jason Xue, and Hong Xu

[USENIX ATC ‘20] NetKernel: Making Network Stack Part of the Virtualized Infrastructure
Zhixiong Niu, Hong Xu, Peng Cheng, Qiang Su, Yongqiang Xiong, Tao Wang, Dongsu Han, and Keith Winstein

[ACM SoCC ‘16] Expeditus: Congestion-aware load balancing in clos data center networks
Peng Wang, Hong Xu, Zhixiong Niu, Dongsu Han, and Yongqiang Xiong

[IEEE MASS ‘16] More is Better? Measurement of MPTCP based Cellular Bandwidth Aggregation in the Wild
Zhixiong Niu, Zhi Wang, Hong Xu, Chuan Wu, and Francis C.M. Lau