**Disaggregation of Mobile Networking Systems Without the Pain**
**Abstract**: The architecture and deployment of mobile networks has experienced dramatic transformation in the past decade, enabled through embracing “disaggregation” at different levels. This in turn has led to diversification of the ecosystem. At the same time, disaggregation of mobile networking systems introduced new challenges. In this talk, I’ll start by giving my perspective on the key drivers (economic and beyond) behind the remarkable transformation of the mobile networking landscape and outline three levels of disaggregation that played a pivotal role. I’ll then shift focus to the challenges arising from disaggregation and my research works aimed at addressing them. In particular, I will highlight my two most recent works in this direction — CoreKube (MobiCom’23) and SpotLight (MobiCom’24) that respectively focus on choosing the right granularity for effective control plane disaggregation in the mobile core and easing the operational complexity in disaggregated multi-vendor Open RAN.
**Bio:** Mahesh Marina is a Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where he leads the Networked Systems Research Group, and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. Previously, he was a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (the UK’s national institute for data science and AI) for five years (2018-23) and has served as the Director of the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture within Informatics@Edinburgh for four years (2018-22). Earlier, he has held visiting roles at ETH Zurich and at Ofcom (the UK’s telecoms regulator). Prior to joining Edinburgh, he had a two-year postdoctoral stint at the UCLA Computer Science Department after earning his PhD in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is an ACM Distinguished Member and an IEEE Senior Member.
