As a continuation of the 2020 Networking request for proposals (RFP), Facebook launched the 2021 Networking RFP with a focus on internet and web services. Today, we’re announcing the winners of this award.

Facebook is one of the biggest internet content providers in the world. Every day, billions of people connect with each other through Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and many other Facebook products. Facebook’s ability to connect people is built upon the internet and web services, one of the most critical infrastructures in the modern world.

“Advances in content delivery techniques and internet transport protocols are necessary to leverage the new capabilities of edge networks. Our collaboration with academia will help us deliver better user experiences for products delivering a wide range of content and media,” says Sanjay Sane, Software Engineering Manager at Facebook. “It was impressive to see the deep insight and varied approaches proposed by this year’s submissions, with many proposals that fused network protocols with application context. We look forward to working with 2021 winners to enable advancement in this important technology space.”

Through this series of RFPs, the Networking team at Facebook aims to foster further innovation in networking research and deepen their collaboration with academia.

The team received 59 high-quality proposals from 11 countries and 49 universities and is pleased to announce the following six winners and eight finalists. Thank you to everyone who took the time to submit a proposal, and congratulations to the winners.

Research award winners

Flexible transport scale-out with modern NICs
Michio Honda (University of Edinburgh)

Learned cross-stack web protocol optimization
Ravi Netravali (Princeton University)

Mitigating the impact of connectivity disruptions on live video QoE
Harsha V. Madhyastha (University of Michigan)

New horizons in network protocol analysis
Robin Marx (KU Leuven), Joris Herbots, Peter Quax, Wim Lamotte (Hasselt University)

Service continuity of serverless computing at the edge via QUIC migration
Enzo Mingozzi (Università di Pisa), Claudio Cicconetti (IIT-CNR)

Virtual reality support at the edge
Sonia Fahmy (Purdue University), George Kesidis (Pennsylvania State University), Voicu Popescu (Purdue University)

Finalists

Agile edge computing with flying ad hoc networks
Sharief Oteafy (DePaul University)

Distributed edge intelligence for social media big data analysis
Hai Dong (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

EDRON: Edge-based object detection at sub-RTT scale
Israat Haque (Dalhousie University)

Elastic edge computing overlay for live 360-deg video streaming
Kanchana Thilakarathna, Albert Zomaya (University of Sydney)

Heterogeneous in-network caching for internet service load balancing
Zaoxing Liu (Boston University)

Meshed tree protocol — A layer 2.5 protocol for content delivery
Nirmala Shenoy, Bill Stackpole, Daryl Johnson (Rochester Institute of Technology)

Re-architecting the QUIC stack for performance
Gianni Antichi, Sebastiano Miano (Queen Mary University of London)

Resource-constrained edge offloading
Roch Guerin, Chenyang Lu, Jiaming Qiu, Ruiqi Wang (Washington University in St. Louis)