Kevin W. Lu

Kevin Lu is Director of Broadband Access Engineering and Operations in the Telcordia Applied Research organization. He is responsible for managing a group in researching and analyzing emerging access network architectures and operations to advise clients on the timeframe, application, and life-cycle economics that are important for their strategic or product planning.

Kevin joined Telcordia on August 20, 1984. He has conducted technical and economic analyses of various wireline or wireless networks, including ADSL, DLC, FTTC, FTTH, HFC, LMDS, MMDS, DBS, SONET, ATM, and DWDM, etc. He has authored or co-authored 51 journal or conference publications in this field, and has performed consulting for a variety of clients including telephone companies, cable TV companies, equipment suppliers, device manufacturers, industry associations, and municipal governments.

Kevin's experiences include:

• Managed projects in developing network capacity management, service activation, and service assurance requirements for the emerging data-centric network architectures based on ADSL or DWDM.
• Conducted analyses of installed first costs and life cycle costs for a number of broadband access networks delivering telephony, high-speed Internet access, and analog and digital video services. Identified geographic areas or locations for cost-effective deployment based on bandwidth requirements, service penetrations, and demographic profiles.
• Defined and developed models for analyzing service activation and assurance costs for ADSL, FTTC/H, and HFC networks delivering voice, data, and video services. The results revealed significant operations cost savings for delivering telephone services over broadband access networks. Identified the location of intelligent network elements as one of the major drivers for operations costs savings regardless of transport media (copper, coax, fiber, or wireless).
• Built installed first cost and life cycle cost models and performed sensitivity analyses for various fiber-in-the-loop architectures included in the Telcordia TR-909 Generic Requirements. The results revealed cost parity between FTTC and DLC systems.
• Quantified the throughput and mean-delay performance for the asymmetric packet switch module with channel grouping used in a class of three-stage ATM switches.
• Developed a framework for characterizing disaster-based network survivability, providing a unified and practical approach to analyzing and designing highly survivable communications networks.
• Analyzed the availability, reliability, and maintainability for a group of N identical systems working in parallel and sharing a pool of r backup systems. The results revealed that the r-for-N pooled protection can have higher availability than the 1-for-1 or 2-for-1 dedicated protection.
• Developed a family of S-curve models for forecasting technological and market obsolescence of telecommunications equipment and facilities. These models have been widely used by telephone companies in assuring timely capital depreciation.

Kevin received the B.S. degree in control engineering from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, in 1979, and the M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in systems science and mathematics from Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, in 1981 and 1984, respectively. He was Adjunct Professor at Rutgers Graduate School of Management, Newark, NJ, and Special Lecturer with the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, New York, NY, in 1989.