The research focuses on developing planning tools for combined voice and data networks. In order to attract voice and high speed internet customers, cable television companies require capacity planning tools to ensure that their networks can provide a good quality of service. The tools will be based on analysis of Internet data traffic and on voice traffic engineering methods adapted to a packet data environment. We will develop and market cost-effective, easy-to-use tools for planning and analyzing the capacity, performance and cost of networks carrying voice and data traffic. The initial focus is on the wideband internet access and cable IP telephony market. By providing cost effectiveness and ease of use, the tools will be attractive to network planners who currently have costly alternatives with long learning curves.

Nortel Networks Inc. is the industrial partner for this component. Robert McGorman is employed in Nortel Networks Succession Networks Capacity and Performance team in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA. The team develops engineering guidelines for Succession ATM and IP and hybrid Communications Servers for converged voice and data carrier networks. A sample of team activities include measurement and analysis of key system resources (real time, traffic, and memory), quality of service, development of planning tools, customer interaction and analysis of field data.
Information about Nortel Networks products, services, and solutions, and about the company itself, can be found at the website: www.nortelnetworks.com.

Dr. Jalal Almhana
Dr. Vartan Choulakian
M. Robert Mcgorman
Dr. Eric Hervet
Dr. Zikuan Liu
Dr. Wissem Jedidi


Jalal Almhana

Dr. Jalal Almhana graduated from the University of Damascus with a Bachelor of Electronics Engineering degree in 1974. He received his M.S., PhD, and 'Doctorat d'État es-Sciences' degrees in computer science from Aix-Marseille III University, France, in 1975, 1978, and 1983 respectively. He worked as researcher from 1975-1978, assistant professor from 1978-1983, and as an associate professor from 1983-1985 at the Aix-Marseille III University. He was an associate professor at the university of Damascus, Syria, from 1985-1988 and consultant to International Telecommunications Union in 1988-1988. He joined the Université de Moncton, Canada, in 1989, where he is currently a professor at the Computer Science Department. His research interests are in distributed and parallel systems, Petri nets, fault tolerant computing, and Internet Applications. He chaired the 16th International Symposium on High Performance Computing and Applications. Also, he acted as reviewer for several journals, and as a program committee member of many specialized conferences. He is a senior member of the IEEE computer society.


Vartan Choulakian

Dr. Choulakian Vartan graduated from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon with BA in Mathematics in 1976. He received M.S. in Applied Mathematics in 1977 and PhD in Mathematical Statistics in 1980 from Jussieu University (Paris VI) in Paris, France. He worked as teaching assistant at Créteil University in Paris from 1978-1980, assistant professor at Setif University in Algeria 1980-1982; and since 1982 he is at the Université de Moncton in Canada. His research interests are in Statistics, in particular, multivariate methods, and estimation of parameters and goodness-of-fit tests.


Robert McGorman

Robert McGorman graduated from McGill University, Montreal, with a B.Sc. (Honours in Mathematics) in 1968. He received an M.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in 1972, and an MBA from the University of Miami, Florida, in 1978. He was employed as a teaching assistant at UBC, as a geophysical data analyst, and as a high school mathematics and science teacher before beginning a career in telecommunications with Bell Canada, Ottawa, in 1978. In 1983 he joined BNR (later part of Nortel Networks) as Member of Scientific Staff. In 1988, he transferred to Nortel's RTP facility in North Carolina, USA, where he is currently Senior Engineer, Succession Networks Capacity and Performance. His interests include mathematical and statistical models, system capacity analysis, and data traffic models.


Eric Hervet

Dr. Eric Hervet graduated from the National Polytechnics Institute of Toulouse, France, with an Engineering degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, in 1996. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Telecommunications from the same institute in 2000. Since then he has been a professor at the Computer Science Department of Université de Moncton. His research interests are signal and image processing, computer vision, and internet technologies. He acted as a reviewer for TGARS journal.


Zikuan Liu

Dr. Zikuan Liu received the Ph.D. (1998) in Electrical Engineering from Nankai University and the MS (2002) in computer science from Concordia University. He has worked as a post doctor at École Polytechnique de Montréal for three years (1998-2001). He is currently a senior researcher in the Department of Computer Science at University of Moncton. His research interests include discrete event dynamical systems, manufacturing systems, stochastic control, mobile computing, and high-speed telecommunication networks.


Wissem Jedidi

Dr. Wissem Jedidi graduated from the Faculty of Sciences of Tunis, Tunisa, with a Bachelor of Fundamental Mathematics in 1993. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Paris VI, France, in Probability and Statistics, in 1995, 2000, respectively. During 1996-2002, he was a member of the European Dynstoch Network (Statistical Methods for Dynamical Stochastic Models). He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Mainz (Germany, 2000-2001). Before he joined the GRETI team, he worked as an assistant at the University of Paris VI (France, 1995-2000), and as an associate professor at the Faculty of Sciences of Sfax (Tunisia, 2001-2002) and the Faculty of Sciences of Tunis (Tunisia, 2002-2003).

Pseudo Self-Similar Traffic: An Extended Markov Model
  Z.K. Liu, V. Choulakian, J. Almhana, R. McGorman
  CNSR 2003 Conference > full paper (pdf 266 KB)

[Last Revised: 2005 January 12]