I’m Ray Han, a Senior Staff Engineer and Head of HyperEdge Networking at ByteDance. I named the concept HyperEdge and have been building the networks around it since 2020. Together they carry on-demand video, live streaming, and real-time communication for Douyin and TikTok, and serve two billion people a day.
Much of my work is turning unreliable household devices into dependable delivery capacity. The heart of it is managing and scheduling heterogeneous resources, transporting media over multiple paths, and caching content at the edge. The same devices now also power two more businesses, media network measurement and distributed content crawling.
The work has produced papers at the field’s top venues and four industry standard drafts. The HyperEdge paper won NSDI’s Outstanding Paper Award. I also mentor graduate students at ByteDance through university partnerships I set up.
Before ByteDance I founded a company that built one of the first production WebRTC networks. Later I turned a research idea into a proof-of-capacity blockchain that has processed more than ten billion transactions. The network I run today draws on both.
Lately I have been thinking about what AI will mean for the world’s network infrastructure.