Prof.
Ted Szymanski, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Department of
ECE, McMaster University
1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4K1
Phone: (905)-525-9140 ext 27697
Fax: (905)-521-2922
Email: teds 'at' mcmaster.ca
Areas
of Interest
- An
Improved Future Internet of Things Network
- An
Improved Future Industrial Internet of Things Network
- An
Improved Future Tactile Internet of Things Network
- Improved
Radio Access Networks (RANs) and 5G Wireless Mesh
Networks (WMNs)
- Improved
Green Cloud Computing
- Improved
Networks-on-a-Chip (NoCs)
- Traffic Engineering (TE) for the Future Industrial-Tactile Internet of Things
- Prospective Graduate Students: Applicants should have good
grades, a high standing in your class from a strong university, and strong
mathematical, analytic and programming skills. Interested students should
apply directly to McMaster university. If you have a masters degree and
wish to apply for the PhD degree with funding, to assess the likelihood of
admission into my research group with funding, please send me an email
with the subject APPLICATION-school-yourname,
where 'school' is the name of your university, and 'yourname'
is your first name. In this email, include your CV and please attach a technical
paper or report (i.e., an IEEE paper that you wrote) that gives me an
indication of your technical expertise. McMaster and international undergraduate students
interested in completing an M.Eng degree in
these areas should apply to the Dept. ECE at McMaster. Unfortunately, due
to the large number of emails I receive I cannot respond to each
email. (For the 2016-2017 academic year, I currently
have no more openings.)
My current interests deals with achieving
an improved future ‘Internet of Things’ network, including
the future ‘Industrial Internet of Things’, the future ‘Tactile
Internet of Things’, future 5G wireless networks, cloud-computing
networks and Networks-on-a-Chip. Currently, there are several international
efforts to define the Future Internet, i.e., the
‘Industrial Internet’ effort led by General Electric and the ‘Tactile Internet’
effort led by the ITU. The world agrees that today’s Best-Effort ‘Internet of
Things’ is significantly over-provisioned, it has relatively poor performance,
it consumes too much power, the router buffer sizes are too large, and it
offers little security against cyber-attacks. Today’s Best-Effort Internet of
Things cannot support the ‘Smart Systems’ needed in the 21-st
century. The future ‘Smart Systems’ include Smart
Cities, the Smart Power Grid, Smart Transportation systems and Smart Healthcare
Systems. In the future, these Smart Systems will integrate millions of
distributed sensors to a cloud-based control-system, where Big-Data algorithms
will process the senor data and improve the performance of these systems (IEEE-Access-Securing-the-Industrial-Tactile-Internet-of-Things,
IEEE-COMM-MAG-Supporting-consumer-services-in-a-Deterministic-Industrial-Internet.pdf
, IEEE-TON-An-Ultra-low-latency-Internet-of-Things.pdf)
The Future Industrial and Tactile Internet of
Things will support many important new Cloud-based services such as
video-distribution, High Performance Cloud Computing and Telemedicine. Canada
is a leader in the delivery of medical services over the Internet. One of the
world's first telerobotic assisted surgeries over the
Internet was performed in Canada in Nov. 2003, over a network of Cisco routers
managed by Bell Canada (Cisco-Bell-Canada-Telemedicine-Operation , IEEE-JSAC-TELEROBOTIC-SURGERY).
Optical
Networks
From 2001 to 2011, Prof. Szymanski held the Red Wilson/Bell
Canada Chair in Data Communications at McMaster University. Research
funders have included the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of
Canada (NSERC), the Networks of Centers of Excellence (NCE) program of Canada
and the Ontario Centers of Excellence (OCE) program; Industrial participants in
research projects have included Bell Canada, Nortel Networks, Newbridge Networks (now Alcatel Systems), Spar Space
Systems, Lucent Technologies, Lockheed-Martin, Sanders and the US Consortium on
Optoelectronic Technologies in Computing.
From 1993-2003 Prof. Szymanski led the
‘Optical Architectures’ project in a 10 year national
research program (based at McGill University) to develop an advanced free-space
optical backplane for the telecommunications industry. The program
was funded by the Networks of Centers of Excellence program of Canada,
with total funding in the range of $10 million dollars. The program
demonstrated an advanced optical backplane system in the year 2003 (NCE_backplane.pdf). This network demonstrated a 4 node
optical ring that supported approx. 1024 optical channels per square centimeter
of free-space crossectional areea.
Collaborators include McMaster University, McGill University, the University of
Toronto, Heriot Watt University (UK), Nortel Networks
(now Ericsson), Newbridge Networks (now Alcatel),
Lockheed-Martin, Sanders and Lucent Technologies. Prof. Szymanski holds a US
patent on the underlying high bandwidth "Intelligent Optical Network"
architecture, along with Prof. Scott Hinton (former Director of Photonic
Switching at Bell Laboratories). Prof. Szymanski also holds a US patent on
embedded Forward-Error-Correction techniques to achieve bandwidth gains in 1D
and 2D free-space and fiber optical links. While at Columbia University, Prof.
Szymanski also proposed the ‘Hypermesh’ optical
network architecture for High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. (Hypermesh
Optical Networks). The hypermesh network model
utilizes the concept of ‘hyper-graphs’ from graph-theory to model optical
switches in each dimension of a mesh-based architecture. Several recent
supercomputers use networks which are best modelled
as hypermeshes / hypergraphs.
Prof. Szymanski and his students
demonstrated two of the most functionally-advanced
optoelectronic integrated circuits in the world (as of the year 2000). These
silicon CMOS devices contained numerous microscopic Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) optical transmitters and receivers, and could be
directly interfaced to hundreds of optical fibers. A single
optoelectronic device occupying approximately one cubic foot of volume can
yield a multi-Terabit switch/router, replacing a room full of cabinets of
conventional electronic switching equipment, and requiring much less volume and
power. Photographs of these devices have appeared on the front cover of the
international journal Optical Society of America (OSA) - Applied Optics twice (Jan.
1998, and March/April
2000). The device fabrication was funded in part by the US Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the US Consortium on Optoelectronic
Technologies and Lucent Technologies through the Lucent/ARPA/COOP integrated
circuit fabrication runs, as well as NSERC and the Networks of Centers of
Excellence program of Canada.
Selected
Publications: Selected-Pubs
Some Lab. Photos:
Team-photos
Some Personal
Photos: Desktop.html