About Don
Interests: Real-time and Systems Software, Linear and Nonlinear
Optimization, Communications Software, Fault Tolerance, and Digital
Design.
"In a real-time system the correctness of a computation depends not
only upon the logical correctness of the result but upon the time at
which it is produced."
I coined this definition in 1991 or
1992, modeling it
after a short 6-line essay - can you guess where I got the idea?
Some of the things I have done in my careeer - - -
- My undergraduate thesis at MIT included a multi-connection TCP
for the IBM in 1984; it became the basis for "FTP Software
Corporation", a billion-dollar IPO company.
- I worked in the distributed systems group at Xerox Office
Systems Division and standardized the 3 XNS mailing protocols to
also allow implementation of news groups using mailbox cache
verifiers.
- I wrote the Iridium Sattelite Kernel, it runs under the pSOS
operating system, carrieds all the phone calls, and has a
co-resident schedulability analyzer called the "Mixed Mode
Schedulability Analyzer" (Mimosa).
- I rewrote the Globalstar base station ACN transport protocols.
Globalstar is 30x larger (10,000 calls) than a regular base
stations. My version was 2.5x faster, implemented correct
congestion control, and could boot the base station much faster.
- I wrote RFC3507, an RPC extension protocol for web caches. This
is probably the first streaming pipelining RPC protocol.
- I was secretary and in charge of upper layer standards and TCP
performance for 802.20, and TIA 47.1, and TIA 47.3 at Qualcomm. The
802.20 work was folded into the LTE (4G) standards.
- I was part of the Dynamic Adaptive Video Streaming (DASH video)
project at Qualcomm. This is THE way stream video on the Internet.
I patented
broadcast adaptive video streaming in 2011, and identified many
advantages of this idea, including seamless handoff between
unicast/broadast transmission. I helped to draft one of the FLUTE
internet protocols (broadcast carousel downloads), RFC6726, and
co-invented the byte-range requests feature (the most important
efficiency improvement in DASH), and co-directed an important user
study of mean opinion score MOS for optimizing DASH video playback.
- From 1999-2003 I wrote some blog entries about my time at Xerox
and Motorola.
I am now a software engineer in the Bay Area. I work as a
a software engineer for Databricks, helping to run their data
warehouse. Regrettably, I cannot accept new students since I have
moved away from Vancouver for good.
Don Gillies - gillies@ece.ubc.ca
Cell: 650-441-5179
Work: TBD
Our first Home.
Our
second Home.
Our
present Home.
Reference Material for a course on Real-Time Systems Design
Curriculum Vitae.
Selected Inventions
- Donald W. Gillies et. al. 23 patent submissions overall.
- 7,069,483 Don Gillies, Weilin Wang, and Michael Nova, System and
method for identifying nodes in a wireless mesh network, granted
2006-06-27
- Donald Gillies, Weilin Wang, Michael Nova, System and
method for routing packets in a wired or wireless network,
2003-11-13. 2003/0212821. Abandoned.
- Donald W. Gillies and Weilin W. Wang. Multi-channel wireless
broadcast protocol for a self-organizing network - assigned to:
Graviton, Inc. December 2002. Reassigned to: Xsilogy, May 2003.
10/316621. Abandoned: 2004.
- Thomas Stockhammer, Donald W. Gillies, Michael Luby, Fatih
Ulupinar, Network streaming of video data using byte range requests,
September 30, 2014. 8,849,950.
- Donald W. Gillies, Charles Lo, Michael Luby, Thomas
Stockhammer, IP broadcast streaming services distribution using file
delivery methods, May 5, 2015. 9,026,671.
- Donald W. Gillies, Yinian Mao, Signaling characteristics of
segments for network streaming of media data, September 21, 2011.
9,445,136.
Selected Publications
- Yao Liu, Sujit Dey, Donald Gillies, Mike Luby, Fatih Ulupinar,
User Experience Modeling for DASH Video,
Proceedings of 20th International Packet Video Workshop (PV), 12-13
December, 2013, San Jose, CA.
PDF (100 KB)
- S. Sharma, W. Feng, and D. Gillies, On the goodput of TCP NewReno
in mobile networks, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on
Computer Communication Networks, Zurich, Switzerland, Aug 2-5, 2010.
PDF (475 KB)
- J. Elson, A. Cerpa (editors) (Donald W. Gillies and Peter Danzig,
primary authors) Internet Content Adaptation Protocol (ICAP), Internet
Engineering Task Force, April 2003. RFC3507.txt (94 KB)
- Le Pocher, H., Leung, V.C.M., and D. W. Gillies, Real-time
multimedia scheduling policies for end-to-end delay jitter and loss
guarantees across ATM satellite systems, IEEE Transactions Selected
Areas in Communications
, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 314-325, Feb. 1999.