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Some researchers spend years working on architectures and technologies that are never adopted by industry or that are used only as transition technologies. Witness the scores who worked on asynchronous transfer mode or basic-rate ISDN.
Other researchers come up with the right answer to a difficult question, only to see the rationale for the question fade, at least temporarily. Daniel Obi Awduche is one of them.
In work with carriers and OEMs in the late 1990s, Awduche applied the protocols for "label switching," developed at Cisco Systems Inc. by Yakov Rekhter, to the emerging field of Internet Protocol (IP) packets carried directly over optical transport. Awduche's version of the ubiquitous MPLS standard was known originally as multiprotocol lambda switching and later as generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS).
Awduche's work at companies as diverse as Marconi Communications and Movaz Networks formed the basis for active packet routing over optical networks, and he helped to form special optical
traffic-engineering groups within the Internet Engineering Task Force.
Unfortunately, GMPLS' adoption by routing and transport specialists happened concurrently with the great telecom collapse of 2001. Awduche managed to keep an important position in carrier networks by
moving to MCI, overseeing the global IP infrastructure of the MCI unit formerly known as UUNET. And
his position seems assured as MCI is merged into Verizon Communications.
After four years of near-total silence in the optical-transport industry, interest in GMPLS seems to
be reviving.
At the end of the day, Awduche did not stick with an unpopular idea in the face of skepticism.
Instead, he stuck with a popular but temporarily unnecessary idea as the industry that supported it
vanished before his eyes.
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