I am an assistant professor at Brown University. My research is in computer systems and networking, and focuses on ways to make specialization for network environments accessible. Toward this goal, I develop new abstractions to help applications cope with both unpredictable bandwidth allocations in the modern Internet, as well as with modern dynamic network environments as software and hardware trends drive increased network variability and complexity.
Before this, I was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley/ICSI in the NetSys lab, and before that I was a graduate student at MIT working with Hari Balakrishnan and Mohammad Alizadeh. My thesis described new abstractions to help applications cope with modern dynamic network environments as software and hardware trends drive increased network variability and complexity. During graduate school, I was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. I previously received a Irwin Mark Jacobs and Joan Klein Jacobs Presidential Fellowship. Prior to graduate school, I was a research assistant at NetSys working with Sylvia Ratnasamy and Scott Shenker. Before that, I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley, from which I graduated with High Honors in 2015.
These are links to my CV, GitHub page, and SSH Public Key. If you want to contact me, you can do so via Keybase, Mastodon, or Email ([email protected]).
★ I maintain a list of some good coffee places.
I am currently recruiting PhD students, though I am usually interested in working with students at all levels and postdocs. If you are already at Brown, please email me. Otherwise, I unfortunately cannot respond to most emails. For prospective Brown students, I recommend simply submitting an application and mentioning me in it. For prospective postdocs, please email me, though I tend to have narrow research area requirements for postdoc positions. Note that using the email address listed above is more likely to elicit a response.
"Lightweight Automated Reasoning for Network Architectures"
Rahul Bothra, Venkat Arun, Brighten Godfrey, Akshay Narayan, Ahmed Saeed
HotNets 2024
[Paper]
"Reverse-Engineering Congestion Control Algorithm Behavior"
Margarida Ferreira, Ranysha Ware, Yash Kothari, Inês Lynce, Ruben Martins, Akshay Narayan, Justine Sherry
IMC 2024
[Paper][Conference Program]
"Principles for Internet Congestion Management"
Lloyd Brown, Albert Gran Alcoz, Frank Cangialosi, Akshay Narayan, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan, Eric Friedman, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Michael Schapira, Scott Shenker.
SIGCOMM 2024
[Paper][Slides][Conference Program]
"How I Learned to Stop Worrying About CCA Contention"
Lloyd Brown, Yash Kothari, Akshay Narayan, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Aurojit Panda, Justine Sherry, Scott Shenker.
Hotnets 2023
[Paper][Slides][Conference Program]
"The Case for an Internet Primitive for Fault Localization"
William Sussman, Emily Marx, Venkat Arun, Akshay Narayan, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan, Aurojit Panda, Scott Shenker.
Hotnets 2022
[Paper][Conference Program]
"Elasticity Detection: A Building Block for Internet Congestion Control"
Prateesh Goyal, Akshay Narayan, Frank Cangialosi, Srinivas Narayana, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan.
SIGCOMM 2022
[Paper][ACM DL][Conference Program]
"Counterfeiting Congestion Control Algorithms"
Margarida Ferreira, Akshay Narayan, Inês Lynce, Ruben Martins, and Justine Sherry.
Hotnets 2021
[Paper][Talk][Conference Program]
"Site-to-Site Internet Traffic Control"
Frank Cangialosi, Akshay Narayan, Prateesh Goyal, Radhika Mittal, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan.
EuroSys 2021, Awarded Best Artifact!
[Paper]
[Long Talk]
[Short Talk]
[SIGOPS Blog Post
+ P-RECS 2022]
[Conference Program]
"Bertha: Tunneling through the Network API"
Akshay Narayan, Aurojit Panda, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Scott Shenker
Hotnets 2020
[Paper][Slides][Talk Video][Conference Program]
"Park: An Open Platform for Learning-Augmented Computer Systems"
Hongzi Mao, Parimarjan Negi, Akshay Narayan, Hanrui Wang, Jiacheng Yang, Haonan Wang, Ryan Marcus, Ravichandra Addanki, Mehrdad Khani Shirkoohi, Songtao He, Vikram Nathan, Frank Cangialosi, Shaileshh Venkatakrishnan, Wei-Hung Weng, Song Han, Tim Kraska, Mohammad Alizadeh.
NeurIPS 2019
[Paper][ICML 2019 RL4RL Workshop][Conference Program]
"Restructuring Endpoint Congestion Control"
Akshay Narayan, Frank Cangialosi, Deepti Raghavan, Prateesh Goyal, Srinivas Narayana, Radhika Mittal, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan.
SIGCOMM 2018
[Paper][Slides PDF][Session Video][Conference Program]
"Sincronia: Near-Optimal Network Design for Coflows"
Saksham Agarwal, Shijin Rajakrishnan, Akshay Narayan, Rachit Agarwal, David Shmoys, Amin Vahdat.
SIGCOMM 2018, Awarded Best Student Paper!
[Paper][Conference Program]
"The Case for Moving Congestion Control Out of the Datapath"
Akshay Narayan, Frank Cangialosi, Prateesh Goyal, Srinivas Narayana, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan.
HotNets 2017.
[Paper][Slides PDF][Slides PPTX][Conference Program]
"Network Requirements for Resource Disaggregation"
Peter Gao, Akshay Narayan, Sagar Karandikar, Joao Carreira, Sangjin Han, Rachit Agarwal, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Scott Shenker.
OSDI 2016.
[Paper][Slides][Poster][Conference Program]
"pHost: Distributed Near-Optimal Datacenter Transport Over Commodity Network Fabric."
Peter Gao, Akshay Narayan, Gautam Kumar, Rachit Agarwal, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Scott Shenker.
CoNEXT 2015.
[Paper][Slides][Conference Program]
"Preview: Networking"
OSDI/ATC 2021 Topic Preview Session
[Slides PDF][Video]
"Modern Network Hardware"
NSDI 2019 Topic Preview Session
[Slides PDF][Video]
"Restructuring Endpoint Congestion Control"
Linux NetDev 0x12
[Talk Listing]
"Restructuring Endpoint Congestion Control"
Akshay Narayan, Frank Cangialosi, Deepti Raghavan, Prateesh Goyal, Srinivas Narayana, Radhika Mittal, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan.
ANRW 2018
[Poster][Poster Listing]
"Elasticity Detection: A Building Block for Delay-Sensitive Congestion Control"
Prateesh Goyal, Akshay Narayan, Frank Cangialosi, Deepti Raghavan, Srinivas Narayana, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan.
ANRW 2018
[Poster Listing]
"Measuring the Energy Impact of Security Protocols."
Akshay Narayan, Michael Chen, Vern Paxson.
[Paper]
"Turbo: Ultra Low Latency Datacenter Transport."
Akshay Narayan, Sarah Hung, Gautam Kumar, Kaifei Chen, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Ion Stoica.
[Paper]