We are pleased to welcome Bilal Saleem to ONF as a summer intern. He is currently a PhD student at Purdue University with plans to graduate in 2025. He would like to work in the networking industry in a systems design role upon graduation and longer term has aspirations to join the world of academia.
At ONF, Bilal is working on a project at Purdue led by Professor Muhammad Shahbaz, to enable Aether to run in multi-node cluster configurations and scale to over 5K users. Moving Aether to a multi node cluster will expand resource sharing and enhance its scalability for a large number of users. The work involves scaling of both the control plane and data plane. The project will also decouple the 5G gNodeB traffic simulator (gNBsim) and the 5G Core, making it possible to scale each independently. The expectation is that gNBsim will provide a comprehensive way to stress test the Core, especially for latency-sensitive use cases (as will be typical for IoT). Some of the open source tools he will be using in these projects are Ansible and Proxmox.
“I am thrilled to be collaborating with Professor Larry Peterson this summer on enhancing the scalability of the open-source project Aether. This opportunity allows me to delve deeper into the workings of the 5G world, which is truly captivating.”, said Bilal.
Bilal was born in Lahore, Pakistan and received his undergraduate degree from the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NUCES-FAST) in computer science before coming to Purdue to pursue his PhD. Other roles he has had include research assistant for NYU in Abu Dhabi on a system design project and Software Engineer at Veriflow, a startup acquired by VMware, that developed a security tool for network configuration verification.
In his free time, Bilal enjoys sports - cricket, table tennis, swimming and gym, as well as travel. He has been to Turkey and the UAE and is looking forward to travel in the US.
