1999 Winner: Outstanding Leadership In Alberta Technology
Revolutionizing Telecommunications With Self-Healing Networks
Dr. Wayne Grover is considered to be a founding inventor in the field of self-healing and self-organizing telecommunications networks and continues to produce innovative research that expands on those original ideas and on the design of other classes of survivable broadband networks.
Critical Importance
He is most widely known for developing a concept that allows telecommunications networks to heal themselves. Transport networks carry tremendous amounts of voice, data and video information through a complex web of fibre optic cables. A failure in just one of these cables can be catastrophic, affecting business operation, banking, security systems, healthcare, 911 service, air traffic control and more. Dr. Grover’s technology enables transmissions to continue without interruption despite failure. The user hears only a brief pause or click.
This concept is now being applied globally, and Dr. Grover and his team of students and researchers at TRLabs continue to work on a number of fronts to develop tools that will help to implement this technology and plan networks using this technique efficiently and effectively. They discovered and developed a way to hybridize the two predominant network architectures (ring and mesh) with a resulting total design cost that is lower than what is possible in either pure architecture. Another exciting advance is the concept of ‘p (for protection)-cycles,’ which combines the best features of each of the two network architectures. Both of these sophisticated advances and the original works on self-healing are patent pending.
Outstanding Accomplishments
Dr. Grover recently received of the 1999 IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) W.R.G. Baker Prize Paper Award for the year’s most outstanding research paper published in any of the organizations journals worldwide and the Outstanding Engineer Award of IEEE Canada for his contributions to the advancements in telecommunications engineering. Worldwide the IEEE publishes over 25% of the world’s scientific literature. He was the McCalla Research Professor in Engineering (1996) and winner of City of Edmonton’s “Smart City Awards” (1998).
