# Biswanath Mukherjee

Biswanath Mukherjee is an Indian-American Distinguished Professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. He was named a fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to the development of architectures, algorithms, and protocols in optical networks.

## Early life

Mukherjee received his bachelor's degree in technology with honors from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 1980 and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1987. That same year, he joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis, where he became a Professor in 1995 and a Distinguished Professor in 2011. From 1997 to 2000, he served as chair of the Computer Science Department. He was a founding board member (2002–2007) of IPLocks, Inc., a Silicon Valley startup acquired by Fortinet. From 1995 to 2000, he held the Child Family Professorship at UC Davis.

## Career

Mukherjee served as general co-chair of the IEEE/OSA Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) Conference in 2011, technical program co-chair of OFC 2009, and technical program chair of IEEE INFOCOM 1996.
Mukherjee edits the Springer series on Optical Networks and has served on eight journal editorial boards, most notably IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and IEEE Network. He has guest-edited special issues of Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, and IEEE Communications.
He was the first elected chairman of the Communication Society's Optical Networking Technical Committee. He was a founding member of the Board of Directors (2002–2007) of IPLocks, Inc., a Silicon Valley startup company acquired by Fortinet, Inc. He also served as a founding member of the board of directors (2015–2018) of Optella, Inc., an optical components startup acquired by Cosemi, Inc. He has also served on the technical advisory board for Teknovus (acquired by Broadcom). He is the founder and President of Ennetix, Inc., a startup company incubated at UC Davis that develops AI-powered network performance analytics and management software. He serves on the advisory board of IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

## Major contributions

* First proposal/prototype for a network intrusion detection system (1990): L. Todd Heberlein, B. Mukherjee, et al., "A Network Security Monitor (NSM)," Proc., 1990 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 296–304, Oakland, CA, May 1990.
* First proposal/prototype for a filtering firewall (1990); today a $8B/yr industry Archived 2019-02-16 at the Wayback Machine: C. Kwok and B. Mukherjee, "Cut-through bridging for CSMA/CD Local Area Networks," IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 38, pp. 938–942, July 1990.
* Contributions and books on Optical backbone network design, IP over optical, virtualization, etc. (1991 onwards).
* First proposal/prototype for dynamic bandwidth allocation in Ethernet optical access networks (2002); over 100 million units deployed worldwide: G. Kramer, B. Mukherjee, and G. Pesavento, "IPACT: A dynamic protocol for an Ethernet PON," IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 74–80, Feb. 2002.
* First proposal to integrate optical and wireless networks (2007): Suman Sarkar, Sudhir Dixit, and Biswanath Mukherjee, "Hybrid Wireless-Optical Broadband Access Network (WOBAN): A Review of Relevant Challenges," IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology, vol. 25, no. 11, Nov. 2007.

## Selected keynote/plenary talks

* May 13, 2019: "Rising Power of the Network User," 23rd Conference On Optical Network Design And Modelling (ONDM 2019), Athens, Greece.
* January 5, 2017: "Cloud Computing and Virtualization," Indian Science Congress, Tirupati, India.
* September 24, 2016: "Disaster Resilience of Telecom Infrastructure," Chinacom, Chongqing, China.
* March 4, 2016: "Network Adaptability to Combat Disaster Disruptions and Cascading Failures," National Communications Conference (NCC), IIT Gauhati, India.
* October 28, 2013: "Software-Defined Optical Networks (SDONs)," ETRI Annual Conference, Jeju, Korea.
* April 18, 2013: "Panorama of Optical Network Survivability," Optical Network Design and Modeling (ONDM) Conference, Brest, France.
* September 3, 2012: "Emerging Technology/Research Trends in Next Generation Optical Networks," Chief Guest and Inauguration Address, Faculty Development Program, SRM University, Chennai, India.
* July 4, 2011: "Network Convergence in the Future Internet", at 12th International Conference on High-Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR), Cartagena, Spain.
* May 31, 2011: Brazilian Symposium on Networks and Distributed Systems (SBRC), Campo Grande, Brazil.
* July 12, 2010: "Convergence in the Optical Internet (COIN)", at 9th Convergence in the Optical Internet (COIN), Jeju, Korea.

## Selected awards

* May 2018: Co-winner, Charles Kao Award (named after Nobel Laureate and Fiber Optic Pioneer Charles Kao) for the Best Paper in IEEE Journal on Optical Communications and Networks (JOCN) for the paper: D. Chitimalla, K. Kondepu, L. Valcarenghi, M. Tornatore, and B. Mukherjee, “5G Fronthaul–Latency and Jitter Studies of CPRI Over Ethernet,” IEEE Journal of Optical Communications & Networking, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 172–182, February 2017.
* Dec. 2017: Co-winner, IEEE Communications Society's Transmission, Access, and Optical Systems (TAOS) Best Paper Award for IEEE Globecom 2017 Optical Networks and Systems (ONS) Symposium, for the paper: Yu Wu, Massimo Tornatore, Yongli Zhao, and Biswanath Mukherjee, “TDM EPON Fronthaul Upstream Capacity Improvement Via Classification and Sifting ,” Proc., IEEE Globecom 2017, Singapore, Dec. 2017.
* May 2016: Winner, UC Davis International Community Building Award.
* December 2015: Winner of the IEEE Communications Society's inaugural (2015) Outstanding Technical Achievement Award "for pioneering work on shaping the optical networking area."
* 2009: Winner, Outstanding Senior Faculty Award, College of Engineering, UC Davis.
* Winner 2004: Distinguished Graduate Mentoring Award, University of California, Davis.
* 1994: Co-winner, Paper Award, 17th National Computer Security Conference, for the paper "Testing Intrusion Detection Systems: Design Methodologies and Results from an Early Prototype."
* 1991: Co-winner, Best Paper Award, 14th National Computer Security Conference, for the paper "DIDS (Distributed Intrusion Detection System – Motivation, Architecture, and an Early Prototype."

## Works

Journal Papers and Conference Proceedings
Books Published
* Biswanath Mukherjee, Optical WDM Networks, Springer, 2006.
* Biswanath Mukherjee, Optical Communication Networks, New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, July 1997.
* Canhui (Sam) Ou and Biswanath Mukherjee, Survivable Optical WDM Networks, Springer, 2005.
* Keyao Zhu, Hongyue Zhu, and Biswanath Mukherjee, Traffic Grooming in Optical WDM Mesh Networks, Springer, 2005