Title: Back to Circuit Switching!

Date: Monday, 19 March 2001

Time: 10:30am to 11:30am

Venue: Room 1403 (Academic Concourse, near lift nos. 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:
For a significant number of years now, the focus of data networking research has been on packet switching. The commercial success of the Internet has fueled this interest even further. More recently, major technological advances have occurred in the field of optical communications components. This has led to the creation of "circuit-switched" optical networks. Furthermore, predictions of bandwidth abundance are increasingly replacing statements of explosive Internet traffic growth. This leads many to believe that circuit switching is making a come-back. In this talk, we explore the implications of this come-back and describe new problems (with some solutions) in networking research resulting from using circuit-switched networks for data communications.

Biography:
Malathi Veeraraghavan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Polytechnic University. Dr. Veeraraghavan received her BTech degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (Madras) in 1984, and MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Duke University in 1985 and 1988, respectively. She worked for ten years in Bell Laboratories conducting research on various networking protocols and control algorithms. She holds sixteen patents, and has received four Best-paper awards. She served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Reliability from 1992-1994. She is currently the IEEE Communications Society E-News Editor, and an Area Editor for IEEE Communication Surveys. She will be serving as the Technical Program Committee Chair for IEEE ICC 2002, which is to be held in New York.