# IRTFOPEN Meeting on Internetworking Challenges for AI ## IETF-125 – 2026-03-17, 01:00 to 03:00 UTC
- Chairs: Dirk Kutscher, Antoine Fressancourt - [Agenda and Presentations](https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/125/session/irtfopen) - [MeetEcho](https://meetings.conf.meetecho.com/ietf125/?session=35170) - [Notes](https://notes.ietf.org/notes-ietf-125-irtfopen) - [IETF-125 Agenda](https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/125/agenda/) ## About The goal of this session is to identify and discuss research challenges for the IRTF at the intersection of AI systems and internetworking. As AI workloads become increasingly distributed across devices, clusters, datacenters, and administrative domains, they raise new questions for networking research, including architecture, transport, reliability, resource disaggregation, communication abstractions, and the implications of AI agents as communicating entities. The session is intended as a forum to help crystallize the most important open problems and possible research directions for the IRTF. This framing builds on the earlier [1st Workshop on Inter-networking Challenges for AI (INET4AI 2025), co-located with CoNEXT 2025](https://irtf-net4ai.github.io/inet4ai/) that discussed networking challenges arising from large-scale distributed generative AI workloads. ## IRTFOPEN Agenda | No. | Title | Speaker | Time | |----|----------------------------|-------------------------------------|-----| | 1 | Welcome | Chairs | 05 min | | 2 | Disaggregated Architectures for Large Model Inference | [Mingxing Zhang](https://madsys.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/~zhangmx/), Tsinghua University | 25 min | | 3 | Reliability Engineering Challenges in Networking for AI | [Hong Xu](https://henryhxu.github.io/index.html), CUHK | 25 min | | 4 | AI Agent Communication | [Lixia Zhang](https://web.cs.ucla.edu/~lixia), UCLA | 25 min | | 5 | Discussion on Internetworking Research Challenges for AI | All | 40 min | Please remember that all sessions are being recorded. ## Speaker Bios ### Mingxing Zhang [Mingxing Zhang](https://madsys.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/~zhangmx/) is a Tenure-track Assistant Professor at Tsinghua University, focusing primarily on memory system research. Initiator of the open-source KVCache.AI projects Mooncake and KTransformers. Authored over 30 papers in prestigious international conferences and journals such as OSDI, SOSP, ASPLOS, HPCA, and EuroSys, including awards such as Best Paper at FAST, Distinguished Paper at SIGSOFT, and the first OSDI paper from a domestic Chinese university. Recipient of the ChinaSys Rising Star and Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Awards, IEEE TCSC Outstanding Dissertation Award, selected into the China Association for Science and Technology’s Young Talent Support Project. Previously served as Chief Algorithm Technology Expert and Dean of the Innovation Research Institute at Sangfor Technologies, where incubated products have been deployed to tens of thousands of customers. ### Hong Xu [Hong Xu](https://henryhxu.github.io/index.html) is an Associate Professor in Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research area is computer networking and systems, particularly machine learning systems and data center networks. His work has received best paper awards from ACM SIGCOMM 2022, IEEE ICNP 2023 and 2015, among others. He has also received multiple collaborative research awards from industry and distinguished reviewer/editor awards from the community. He is a senior member of ACM and IEEE, and an associate editor of ACM TOCS and IEEE TNSE. ### Lixia Zhang [Lixia Zhang](https://web.cs.ucla.edu/~lixia) received her PhD in computer science from MIT and worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as a member of the research staff. She is now a professor in the Computer Science Department at UCLA, where she holds the UCLA Postel Chair in Computer Systems. She is a fellow of the ACM and IEEE, a recipient of the ACM SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement Award and the IEEE Internet Award, an inductee into the Internet Hall of Fame, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Since 2010, she has led the design and development of Named Data Networking (NDN), a new Internet protocol architecture (http://named-data.net/).
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