Joel W. Gannett

Dr. Joel W. Gannett, Senior Scientist, explores a wide range of technological and scientific issues related to electronics and broadband telecommunications.  This breadth of interest and expertise is reflected in his varied list of publications.  In recent years, Joel has focused on performance and design issues for leading-edge optical and wireless telecommunication technologies.  Joel has published original research on enhancing the performance of the small buffers available in Data in the Optical Domain (DOD-N) networks, quantifying the value of dynamic optical network reconfigurability, bandwidth granularity effects, bandwidth grooming, the application of network coding to multicast networks, automated identification of optical impairments from eye diagram analysis, and other topics.  He is co-inventor of U.S. Patent 7,286,480, Method and System for Design and Routing in Transparent Optical Networks. 

Joel creates original software for most of his research projects. His past software creations include tools for broadband network optimization.  A paper on Joel's Strategic Network Layout Planner optimization tool, which appeared in the Journal of Heuristics, is available.  Joel's software creations also include an in-house simulator based on chaotic mapping techniques to emulate traffic self-similarity.  This tool was used to address Quality of Service (QoS) issues in Voice over IP (VoIP) networks, including performance assessments for a variety of audio CODECs under realistic scenarios of IP network architecture and congestion. 

Joel has applied the publicly available ns simulator in several studies to investigate the effect of TCP protocol dynamics on IP traffic congestion.  He has also worked extensively with the commercial OPNET simulator, either building custom OPNET models from scratch or customizing existing models, to study the performance of optical and wireless networks.  Joel has used OPNET to study QoS improvement techniques in MANET FCS (Future Combat System) wireless networks.

Joel's past research has led to exploration of SONET, ATM, and WDM network management issues (SNMP and CMISE), highly-efficient discrete-event simulation for large-scale systems, aspects of neural network system design, VLSI Computer-Aided Design tools, VLSI chip design, and VLSI Design for Testability techniques (the last resulting in U.S. patent no. 4,551,838, for which he was sole inventor, granted in the United States and several other countries).

Joel Gannett's 1990 Shortfinder paper was the seminal paper in the literature describing a technique for locating shorts in integrated circuit layouts that has now been adopted throughout the semiconductor industry.  Although he focuses on technology issues, Joel Gannett's paper on Einstein's Theory of Relativity, titled Nothing but Relativity, Redux, drew considerable attention when it was published by the European Journal of Physics in 2007.  Joel's relativity work was the subject of a feature interview article by reporter Lisa Zyga of the science news service PhysOrg.com.

Joel Gannett was awarded the Ph.D degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.  His Ph.D dissertation dealt with fundamental properties of nonlinear networks, and his two Ph.D minors were mathematics and physics.  Joel's M.S. degree was also awarded by the Department of EECS at Berkeley.  In his M.S. thesis, Joel derived a circuit model for IMPATT diodes from basic device physics.  Both his Ph.D dissertation and his M.S. thesis were published.  Joel's B.S.E.E. degree, awarded with High Distinction, is from the University of Iowa, Iowa City.  Before joining Telcordia, Joel was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories (now Alcatel-Lucent) in Murray Hill, New Jersey and a Senior Computer-Aided Design Engineer at Advanced Micro Devices in Sunnyvale, California.  He received a Telcordia President's Recognition Award in 1994 for his early network management contributions to the MONET (Multiwavelength Optical NETworking) project.  Joel is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu, and is a Senior Member of the IEEE.