Anup Agarwal

Office: 9005 Gates & Hillman Centers, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Contact: anupa@cmu.edu

Hey, I’m Anup

I am a final year PhD Student in CSD at CMU advised by Prof. Srinivasan Seshan. I am broadly interested in systems and networking.

I am on the industry/industry research job market.
My research explores a variety of topics including network transport, programmable networks, network telemetry, and cluster scheduling.

Previously, I completed my undergraduate studies from Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IITG). Outside of work, I enjoy climbing, hiking, skiing, playing the violin, badminton/tennis.

Thesis research

My thesis designs network control algorithms (e.g., congestion control, adaptive bitrate streaming algorithms) that provably guarantee performance (e.g., bound latency, packet loss, utilization, fairness etc.) under challenging network scenarios (e.g., delay jitter, shallow buffers).

The key insight is to explicitly reason about uncertainty in network state (e.g., link capacity, buffer sizes, competing flows, etc.). This yields new structure in control algorithms that vastly simplifies their design and analysis.

My thesis, spread over 4 major publications [NSDI24, CoNEXT25 (in submission), NSDI26a, NSDI26b], makes the following contributions:

Main Publications

    1. FRCC: Towards fair and robust congestion control
      Anup Agarwal, Venkat Arun, and Srinivasan Seshan
      • USENIX NSDI, 2026 — 
      • [code]
      @inproceedings{frcc,
  author = {Agarwal, Anup and Arun, Venkat and Seshan, Srinivasan},
  title = {FRCC: Towards fair and robust congestion control},
  booktitle = {23rd {USENIX} Symposium on Networked Systems Design and
                  Implementation ({NSDI} 26)},
  year = {2026},
  address = {Renton, WA},
  conference = {USENIX NSDI},
  month = apr,
  publisher = {{USENIX} Association},
  code = {https://github.com/108anup/frcc/}
}
    2. Syntra: Synthesizing Cross-Layer Controllers for Low-Latency Video Streaming
      Jia Pan, Anup Agarwal, Isil Dilling, and Venkat Arun
      • USENIX NSDI, 2026 — 
      • [code]
      @inproceedings{syntra,
  author = {Pan, Jia and Agarwal, Anup and Dilling, Isil and Arun, Venkat},
  title = {Syntra: Synthesizing Cross-Layer Controllers for Low-Latency Video Streaming},
  booktitle = {23rd {USENIX} Symposium on Networked Systems Design and
                  Implementation ({NSDI} 26)},
  year = {2026},
  address = {Renton, WA},
  conference = {USENIX NSDI},
  month = apr,
  publisher = {{USENIX} Association},
  code = {https://github.com/tonyPan123/syntra-experiment}
}
    3. Contracts: A unified lens on congestion control robustness, fairness, congestion, and generality
      Anup Agarwal, Venkat Arun, and Srinivasan Seshan
      • arXiv, 2025 — 
      • [cite]
      @misc{contracts-arxiv,
  title = {Contracts: A unified lens on congestion control robustness, fairness, congestion, and generality},
  author = {Agarwal, Anup and Arun, Venkat and Seshan, Srinivasan},
  year = {2025},
  eprint = {2504.18786},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.NI},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18786},
  conference = {arXiv}
}
    4. Towards provably performant congestion control
      Anup Agarwal, Venkat Arun, Devdeep Ray, Ruben Martins, and Srinivasan Seshan 
      @inproceedings{ccmatic-nsdi,
  author = {Agarwal, Anup and Arun, Venkat and Ray, Devdeep and Martins, Ruben and Seshan, Srinivasan},
  title = {Towards provably performant congestion control},
  booktitle = {21st {USENIX} Symposium on Networked Systems Design and
                  Implementation ({NSDI} 24)},
  year = {2024},
  address = {Santa Clara, CA},
  conference = {USENIX NSDI},
  month = apr,
  publisher = {{USENIX} Association},
  url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi24/presentation/agarwal-anup},
  code = {https://github.com/108anup/ccmatic}
}
    5. Unlocking unallocated cloud capacity for long, uninterruptible workloads
      Anup Agarwal, Shadi Noghabi, Inigo Goiri, Srinivasan Seshan, and Anirudh Badam
      • USENIX NSDI, 2023 — 
      • [cite]
      • [pdf]
      @inproceedings{slacksched,
  author = {Agarwal, Anup and Noghabi, Shadi and Goiri, Inigo and Seshan, Srinivasan and Badam, Anirudh},
  title = {Unlocking unallocated cloud capacity for long, uninterruptible workloads},
  booktitle = {20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 23)},
  year = {2023},
  isbn = {978-1-939133-33-5},
  address = {Boston, MA},
  pages = {457--478},
  url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi23/presentation/agarwal-anup},
  publisher = {USENIX Association},
  month = apr,
  conference = {USENIX NSDI}
}
    6. Automating network heuristic design and analysis
      Anup Agarwal, Venkat Arun, Devdeep Ray, Ruben Martins, and Srinivasan Seshan 
      @inproceedings{ccmatic,
  author = {Agarwal, Anup and Arun, Venkat and Ray, Devdeep and Martins, Ruben and Seshan, Srinivasan},
  title = {Automating network heuristic design and analysis},
  year = {2022},
  isbn = {9781450398992},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3563766.3564085},
  doi = {10.1145/3563766.3564085},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 21st ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks},
  pages = {8–16},
  numpages = {9},
  keywords = {automated reasoning, congestion control},
  location = {Austin, Texas},
  series = {HotNets '22},
  conference = {HotNets}
}
    7. HeteroSketch: Coordinating Network-wide Monitoring in Hetero-geneous and Dynamic Networks
      Anup Agarwal, Zaoxing Liu, and Srinivasan Seshan 
      @inproceedings{heterosketch,
  author = {Agarwal, Anup and Liu, Zaoxing and Seshan, Srinivasan},
  title = {HeteroSketch: Coordinating Network-wide Monitoring in
                  Hetero-geneous and Dynamic Networks},
  booktitle = {19th {USENIX} Symposium on Networked Systems Design and
                  Implementation ({NSDI} 22)},
  year = {2022},
  url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi22/presentation/agarwal},
  address = {Renton, WA},
  conference = {USENIX NSDI},
  month = apr,
  publisher = {{USENIX} Association},
  code = {https://github.com/108anup/NetMon-query-planner}
}
    8. Redesigning Data Centers for Renewable Energy
      Anup Agarwal, Jinghan Sun, Shadi Noghabi, Srinivasan Iyengar, Anirudh Badam, Ranveer Chandra, Srinivasan Seshan, and Shivkumar Kalyanaraman
      • HotNets, 2021 — 
      • [cite]
      @inproceedings{vb,
  author = {Agarwal, Anup and Sun, Jinghan and Noghabi, Shadi and Iyengar, Srinivasan and Badam, Anirudh and Chandra, Ranveer and Seshan, Srinivasan and Kalyanaraman, Shivkumar},
  title = {Redesigning Data Centers for Renewable Energy},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twentieth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in
                  Networks},
  year = {2021},
  pages = {45-52},
  doi = {10.1145/3484266.3487394},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3484266.3487394},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  isbn = {9781450390873},
  location = {Virtual Event, United Kingdom},
  numpages = {8},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  series = {HotNets '21},
  conference = {HotNets}
}
    9. ABC: A Simple Explicit Congestion Controller for Wireless Networks
      Prateesh Goyal, Anup Agarwal, Ravi Netravali, Mohammad Alizadeh, and Hari Balakrishnan
      • USENIX NSDI, 2020 — 
      • [cite]
      @inproceedings{abc,
  author = {Goyal, Prateesh and Agarwal, Anup and Netravali, Ravi and Alizadeh, Mohammad and Balakrishnan, Hari},
  title = {{ABC}: A Simple Explicit Congestion Controller for Wireless
                  Networks },
  booktitle = {17th {USENIX} Symposium on Networked Systems Design and
                  Implementation ({NSDI} 20)},
  year = {2020},
  pages = {353--372},
  url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi20/presentation/goyal},
  address = {Santa Clara, CA},
  conference = {USENIX NSDI},
  isbn = {978-1-939133-13-7},
  month = feb,
  publisher = {{USENIX} Association}
}