SFU computing science professor Jiangchuan Liu has been awarded the 2015 IEEE INFOCOM Test of Time Paper Award for the 2005 paper, CoolStreaming/DONet: A data-driven overlay network for peer-to-peer live media streaming.

IEEE INFOCOM – consistently ranked by Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Research as the top computer networking conference – reviewed papers published from 2003 to 2005 that have been widely recognized for their significant impact on the research community. Co-authored with Xinyan Zhang, Bo Li and Yum, T.P., Liu’s groundbreaking paper has received more than 2000 citations.

The work developed the first large-scale Peer-to-Peer (P2P) video streaming system in the world. The data-driven overlay, also referred to as swarming, was the key technology underpinning the CoolStreaming system.

This system used a distributed gossip protocol to explore content availability with a small set of neighbors to form a random overlay for video retrieval. The use of some forms of multicast trees was a breakthrough that challenged the conventional video broadcast paradigm.

The random overlay in CoolStreaming achieved superior scaling in comparison to then state-of-the-art technologies: from supporting only hundreds of viewers to hundreds of thousands of viewers. The commercial offering of CoolStreaming later was able to scale to support millions of viewers.

“Ten years ago, Dr. Liu addressed one of the most important scientific challenges in networking: large-scale peer-to-peer live media streaming,” says professor Greg Mori, director of SFU's School of Computing Science.

“This award speaks to Dr. Liu’s incredible talent and prescient vision in the field of networking, and is testament to the quality, longevity and groundbreaking potential of his research. It is an inspiration to our students to have a professor of this caliber as a research mentor.”

Liu, who joined SFU’s School of Computing Science in 2004, is an NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellow and an EMC-Endowed Visiting Chair Professor of Tsinghua University, Beijing, China (2013-2016). He received a doctorate from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2003, and a BEng (Cum Laude) from Tsinghua University in 1999.