Rohail Asim
I am a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University advised by Professor Yasir Zaki and Professor Lakshminarayanan Subramanian . My research interests include Computer Networks, Artificial Intelligence, and Sustainable Computing. I completed my BS in Computer Science in 2019 from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) where I also worked as a Research Assistant at the Technology for People Initiative (TPI) before joining NYU. I am currently working on multiple projects within the domain of Computer Networks especially involving the analysis and advancement of Congestion Control protocols for next generation wireless networks.
Media Coverage
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Projects
Enabling High Bandwidth Applications over 5G Environments
Millimeter wave technology, commonly known as mmWave, is a vital enabler of the next generation of last-hop communications for mobile devices, with the potential to offer ultra-high-speed wireless communications. These advancements have enabled a range of new applications that employ Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) to create numerous promising applications in various fields such as entertainment, education, and healthcare. However, current congestion control protocols are predominantly throughput-oriented and not suitable for handling the strict low-latency and high-throughput requirements imposed by many of the forthcoming new applications. We propose a new delay-based tunable approach to congestion control that relies on looking ahead in time to better control the sending rate while maintaining low latency, making it suitable for AR/VR applications.
SONIC: Connect the Unconnected via FM Radio & SMS
Over 2.6 billion people remain without access to the Internet in 2025. This disparity is most pronounced in developing regions, with affordability being the primary barrier. Existing solutions like satellite internet (Starlink) and high-altitude networks (Aquila, Loon) are costly and difficult to scale, making them impractical for low-resource areas. We introduce SONIC, a novel connectivity solution that leverages FM radio infrastructure—already covering 70% of the world’s population—to deliver simplified webpages. SONIC exploits the broadcast nature of the radio network, utilizing highly avail- able unused frequencies, to reach long distances. SONIC compresses webpages into images, encodes them to audio signals, and transmits via FM stations. Mobile devices running the SONIC app decode these signals to reconstruct webpages. SONIC also enables Large Language Model (LLM) interactions, transmitting text-based responses
Sustainable AI
Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence have fueled a rising demand for a broad spectrum of services harnessing these advanced technologies. These high-demand services rely on data centers, which consume significant amounts of electricity. The resulting carbon emissions from these data centers threaten to exacerbate the climate crisis. Unfortunately, in their current state, it is challenging to rely solely on renewable energy sources such as wind energy and solar energy to support these energy demands in an economically feasible manner. New policies are being implemented to reduce carbon emissions, prompting the need for sustainable design in new systems, such as data centers for AI computation. To satisfy these policy requirements and mitigate carbon emissions, any new system must prioritize sustainability. This project aims to develop a system to assess the economic feasibility of sustainable computing within AI services. The simulator will model interactions between key stakeholders and evaluate the environmental and economic impact of sustainability policies.
Evaluating Congestion Control Protocols in 5G Environments
The rapid evolution of the next generation of mobile networks has paved the path for the development of a wide array of exciting new applications. Instead of gradual and incremental enhancements, each new generation of mobile networks is improving the capabilities of cellular networks tenfold, with 5G typically being 10 times faster than 4G, and 6G anticipated to be an improvement over 5G with an even higher factor. With these rapid exponential improvements, it is important to ensure that all layers of the network stack are able to keep up and support the performance improvements that are available with these new technologies. However, we still lack a clear understanding of the performance characteristics of current state-of-the-art Congestion Control Algorithms (CCA) in 5G environments with high channel fluctuations over short time scales. We conduct an in-depth analysis of 10 CCAs across various 5G environments, including recently proposed and conventional ones, revealing several interesting results.
Impact of Congestion Control on Mixed Reality Applications
The rapid increase in popularity of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) has paved the way for the development of new applications that have the potential to revolutionize the current landscape of industries such as entertainment, education, and healthcare. A core component required to enable the development of these prospective applications is the ability to stream immersive videos in high quality with ultra-low latency. As a significant percentage of VR video traffic is expected to be delivered over mobile networks, it is important to evaluate if these networks are capable of supporting immersive video streaming. Although next-generation mobile networks offer the ultra-high bandwidth capabilities required to support AR/VR applications, it is currently unclear if current Congestion Control Algorithms (CCAs) are capable of effectively utilizing these networks to meet the strict throughput and latency requirements demanded by these applications. This project aims to evaluate the performance of existing CCAs for such AR/VR applications. We study the performance of prominent CCAs to evaluate: (i) the performance of these CCAs in 3G, 4G, and 5G environments for streaming current VR videos; and (ii) the performance of these CCAs in simulations with the expected bandwidth requirements of future AR/VR applications.
Selected Publications
[1] R Asim, L Subramanian, and Y Zaki Impact of Congestion Control on Mixed Reality Applications
EMS '24: Proceedings of the 2024 SIGCOMM Workshop on Emerging Multimedia Systems
[2] A Pandey, R Asim, K Mengal, M Varvello, and Y Zaki SONIC: Connect the Unconnected via FM Radio & SMS
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies
[3] R Asim, A Sathiaseelan, A Chatterjee, M Lal, Y Zaki, L Subramanian The GAIUS Experience: Powering a Hyperlocal Mobile Web for Communities in Emerging Regions
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Information & Communication Technologies and Development
[4] R Asim, A Bhardwaj, L Subramanian, and Y Zaki Enabling High Bandwidth Applications over 5G Environments
Demo in ACM SIGCOMM 2024
[5] A Pandey, R Asim, M Varvello, Y Zaki Connecting the Unconnected Using FM Radio
Demo in ACM SIGCOMM 2024
[6] A Pandey, R Asim, M Varvello, L Subramanian, Y Zaki Towards Faster Web in Developing Regions
Demo in ACM SIGCOMM 2024
[7] H. Ibrahim, F. Liu, R. Asim, T., Y. Zaki et al. Perception, performance, and detectability of conversational artificial intelligence across 32 university courses
In Scientific Reports 13 (1), 12187
[8] H Ibrahim, R Asim, F Zaffar, T Rahwan, Y Zaki Rethinking homework in the age of artificial intelligence
IEEE Intelligent Systems 38 (2), 24-27
[9] M Chaqfeh, R Asim, B AlShebli, MF Zaffar, T Rahwan, Y Zaki Towards a world wide web without digital inequality
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120 (3), e2212649120
[10] H Ibrahim, R Asim, M Varvello, Y Zaki I Tag, You Tag, Everybody Tags!
In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference, 561-568
[11] Y Zaki, R Asim, M Khan, S Iyer, T Ahmad, T Potsch, L Subramanian ALCC: Migrating Congestion Control To The Application Layer In Cellular Networks
Journal of Systems Research 2 (1)