About Me

This is William. I’m an undergraduate student majoring in Computer Science & Statistics with a minor in Mathematics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

I have a broad interest in networked systems research, no matter it’s wired or wireless, at the edge or in the data center, benefiting service providers or clients. I like building theoretically provable and smart heuristic solutions, but I’m also open-minded in including data-driven approaches in my research.

At UIUC, I work closely with Prof. Deepak Vasisht on space networks and content delivery, and Prof. Tianyin Xu on cloud systems. I also collaborate with Akamai in my CDN research.

Publications

StarCDN: Moving Content Delivery Networks to Space
William X. Zheng, Aryan Taneja, Maleeha Masood, Anirudh Sabnis, Ramesh Sitaraman, Deepak Vasisht
Under review Sigcomm 2025
[PDF]

Fidelity of Cloud Emulators: The Imitation Game of Testing Cloud-based Software
Anna Mazhar, Saad Sher Alam, William X. Zheng, Yinfang Chen, Suman Nath, Tianyin Xu
ICSE 2025
[PDF]

Research Experience

• Satellite-based CDNs (May 2024 - Present, with Prof. Deepak and Akamai)
  • Built a theoretically provable high-fidelity CDN traffic generator for geographically diversed traces that achieves < 1% difference in hit rate curve and requests distribution with real traces.
  • Designed and evaluated a satellite-based CDN system that can reduce current space networks’ uplink usage by up to 80% and latency by 50% as compared to current space networks.
• Cloud Management Systen Interaction (May 2024 - Present, with Prof. Tianyin)
  • Studied the interaction and failure patterns between cloud management system, operator, and applications.
  • Found 70+ new bugs with a tool implemented based on the findings in study.
• Cloud Storage System Emulator Fidelity (May 2023 - March 2024, with Prof. Tianyin)
  • Built a fuzzing tool that identifies 94 API discrepancies between emulator and actual services.
  • Presented a detailed study on discrepancies.