He has advised six Ph.D. students to their graduation and supervised two postdocs. As the director of LONGLAB (Laboratory Of Networking Group), Dr. Cheng has been the Principal Investigator (PI) and a Co-PI of more than fifteen projects supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, Agere Systems, Inc., East Penn Manufacturing Co., Inc., PPL Corporation, and ABB, Inc.