Benson receives second Test of Time Award

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering's Theophilus Benson has received the 2025 Internet Measurement Conference Test of Time Award, honoring research papers that have had a significant impact on the field of network measurement since their publication.

This is the second Test of Time Award that Benson has received for the paper, "Network Traffic Characteristics of Data Centers in the Wild." He also was recognized for this research in 2022 by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications (ACG SIGCOMM).

Published in 2010, the paper was one of the most comprehensive measurement studies on data center networks and continues to be one of the key datasets used by the community in evaluating their designs. 

"In the fifteen years since this paper was published, artificial intelligence has really shined a spotlight on the importance of conversations about the efficiency of data centers. However, lack of open source data remains a significant hurdle in evaluation and optimization," said Benson. "This paper remains relevant today because of its systematic analysis and public datasets."

"Network Traffic Characteristics of Data Centers in the Wild" was published while Benson was a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The paper includes co-authors Aditya Akella of UT Austin and David A. Maltz of Microsoft Research. 

"It's interesting to look back at this research now as faculty at Carnegie Mellon, because my co-authors also have meaningful connections to this university," said Benson. Both Akella and Maltz are Carnegie Mellon alumni, earning their Ph.D.s from the Department of Computer Science.

Benson was honored earlier this month at the 2025 Internet Measurement Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. The 2025 Internet Measurement Conference is a three-and-a-half day event focusing on Internet measurement and analysis. The conference is sponsored by ACM SIGCOMM.