The Organizing Committee of the 15th International Conference on Network of the Future (NoF 2024) is pleased to announce that Yinan Qian has been selected to receive the NoF 2024 Best Paper Award for her work on adaptive edge-to-cloud traffic steering.

Winning Paper

Adaptive Edge-to-Cloud Traffic Steering for Latency-Critical Applications in Next-Generation CDN Architectures

Author Yinan Qian (Pinterest, Inc., San Francisco, CA, United States)
Affiliation Pinterest, Inc. · Tufts University, Medford, MA
Award Best Paper Award, NoF 2024
Date Conferred 4 October 2024
Published In Proceedings of the 15th NoF, IEEE Xplore · DOI: 10.1109/NoF64105.2024

Research Summary

Emerging latency-critical applications such as real-time video processing, online gaming, and autonomous coordination demand deterministic end-to-end latency guarantees that traditional CDN architectures struggle to provide. This paper introduces a novel adaptive traffic steering framework that dynamically routes requests across edge-to-cloud continuums based on real-time network conditions, application requirements, and edge node capacity.

The system integrates a lightweight latency predictor with a multi-objective optimization engine that balances strict latency constraints against cost and throughput objectives. Evaluations using production traffic traces demonstrate:

  • 31% reduction in tail latency (p99) compared to conventional anycast routing
  • 24% improvement in request success rate under traffic surge conditions
  • 19% reduction in cloud egress costs through intelligent edge offloading
  • Computational overhead within practical limits for real-time decision-making at production scale

About the Author

Yinan Qian is an Infrastructure Engineer at Pinterest, Inc., where she works on CDN strategy, DNS configuration, and edge service architecture using Envoy proxy. She previously served as a Software Development Engineer at Amazon Web Services, contributing to the VPC Reachability Analyzer and Network Access Analyzer teams. She holds an M.S. in Software Engineering from Tufts University. Her research interests include content delivery infrastructure, edge computing, and adaptive routing algorithms for next-generation networks.

Selection & Award

The Best Paper Award was selected by the NoF 2024 Technical Program Committee. Papers were evaluated on originality, technical quality, clarity of presentation, and potential impact on future internet research. Two papers of equal merit were recognized this year. The awards were presented during the closing session on 4 October 2024.

About NoF 2024

The 15th edition of the International Conference on Network of the Future was held in Castelldefels/Barcelona, Spain, from 2 to 4 October 2024. Organized by DNAC, France, the conference featured technical sessions, invited talks, and the Best Paper Award ceremony. Proceedings are published in IEEE Xplore.