Architect, Media Gateway R&D at Nortel
Austin, Texas Area
- Current
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- Architect, Media Gateway R&D at Nortel
- Past
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- Senior Member of Scientific Staff, UMTS SGSN R&D at Nortel
- Senior Member of Scientific Staff, DMS-100 XPM R&D at Bell Northern Research
- Programmer Analyst at Pratt & Whitney
- Apprentice Software Engineer at Cadre Technologies
- Education
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- North Carolina State University
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- State University of New York College at Fredonia
- Recommended
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2 people have recommended Todd - Connections
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connections
- Industry
- Telecommunications
Todd Swierk’s Summary
I have a diverse and successful background in working on real-time oriented systems requiring high reliability and quality. One of my strengths is starting on new product development, quickly learning and assessing the area, and leading teams to develop solutions that are simple but extensible with quality. The majority of my experience is in the telecom arena.
My current goal is to be in a position to focus on longer term group direction and product vision. This combines my strong passion for exploration/learning with my technical strengths and bottom line business focus.
I have just completed a 1 year Nortel internal leadership program called Leadership Edge (executive sponsored/nominated). Focus is on leadership and career development, networking, financial training, and strengthening of business acumen.
In my current role I am a wireless architect with experience on GSM/UMTS media gateway development, protocols, software development and architecture, and product life cycle.
My current areas of architectural responsibility include the media gateway H.248 interface, VoIP, 3GPP R6/R7 IM-MGW and MRFP development, wireline and wireless converged MGW development, and standalone/reseller media gateway development.
My background includes-
- 3GPP voice core MGW development
- 3GPP packet core SGSN development
- Nortel DMS-100 peripherals R&D for public carrier networks
- other wide-ranging experiences in OSs, programming languages, architectures, networks, processors, and technologies
Todd Swierk’s Specialties:
- 3GPP GSM/UMTS packet voice and data network architecture
- media gateway protocols, functionality, and architecture
- technologies: GSM, UMTS, UMA, 802.11a/b/g, VoATM, VoIP, 3GPP IMS
- protocols: VoIP protocols, H.248, UDP, TCP, RTP, MPLS
- standards: 3GPP, ITU-T, IETF and IEEE
- skills: excellent written/verbal communication skills, real-time development and debugging, software architecture, design for software reliability, seasoned/veteran software developer
Todd Swierk’s Experience
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Architect, Media Gateway R&D
Nortel
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; NT; Telecommunications industry)
June 2002 — Present (7 years 2 months)
Wireless architect for Nortel's GSM/UMTS media gateway (MGW) supporting the 3GPP R4-R7 specifications.
My current areas of responsibility include-
- MGW H.248 interface prime (responsible for software architecture, input to 3GPP and other standards, open MGW IOT development)
- all IP VoIP solutions (Iu-CS/IP, IPBCP, SDP, Nb, Mb, QoS)
- 3GPP IMS R6/R7 IM-MGW and MRFP development
- wireline and wireless converged MGW development
- standalone/reseller MGW development
I have been a senior design member for the first 2 product releases and an architect for last 4 product releases.
My past R&D MGW experience includes development on the initial Nortel GSM/UMTS R4 MGW based on the Passport hardware platform. This product has proven to be field reliable and is currently widely deployed in a major US operator network. I was also architect prime responsible for driving requirements and development to support Chinese MII and other trials with Nortel enjoying successful results. -
Senior Member of Scientific Staff, UMTS SGSN R&D
Nortel
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; NT; Telecommunications industry)
November 1999 — June 2002 (2 years 8 months)
Senior designer on Nortel's initial 3GPP UMTS SGSN design team.
Responsibilities included-
- team lead of 4 investigating port of GPRS SGSN solution to cPCI platform
- team lead of 8 designers for UMTS SGSN control plane development (GMM, SM, i/fs to RNC, HLR, GGSN) including software design cycle from functional/3GPP specs, high level design, detailed design, coding, and unit test
- UMTS SGSN GMM prime and code owner
- team lead of 18 for initial UMTS SGSN nodal integration
- UMTS SGSN nodal prime in end to end lab in Paris to achieve first (mobile-RNC-SGSN-GGSN-network) ping of Nortel's UMTS packet core solution
- team lead of 38 for UMTS SGSN R&D support team responsible for tracking/screening/assigning software change requests, supporting product verification, traffic, and system integration
- provided support of Korean (SKT and KT) UMTS trials
- designer prime for MPLS support
- team lead of 4 for SGSN control plane redundancy (up to HLD preview stage) -
Senior Member of Scientific Staff, DMS-100 XPM R&D
Bell Northern Research
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; NT; Telecommunications industry)
June 1993 — November 1999 (6 years 6 months)
Started on DMS-100 XPM development. Took on increasing responsiblities to attain senior member of scientific staff. Relocated within Nortel from NC to TX to pursue wireless data opportunities.
Key contributions-
- team lead of 8 architects for reviewing config/arch changes for all public carrier network peripheral (XPM) loads (involved coordination with numerous sites world-wide)
- code owner for base layer XPM software
- debugging of many tricky base XPM real-time issues
- set directions for S/W architecture and code cleanups to improve robustness and reliability of legacy S/W
- key work to provide significant real-time and memory recovery to extend lifetime of legacy hardware
- major contributor in project to replace proprietary operating system with 3rd party OS
- major contributor in project to convert 5M lines of Pascal into C++ via transliteration tool
- major contributor in project to move from Pascal source base on Motorola 68K processors to C++/PowerPC hardware -
Programmer Analyst
Pratt & Whitney
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; UTC; Aviation & Aerospace industry)
May 1992 — December 1992 (8 months)
Co-op industrial assignment while at Rensselaer with goal to focus on robotics and automation. I accepted a position in the Management Information Systems (M.I.S.) team that supported equipment to fully automate grinding of turbine blades for military and commercial jet engines.
Key contributions-
- authored software to generate daily product status reports based on turbine blade production data in DBMS and SQL databases
- learned and helped maintain software integrating Hauni-Blohm automated turbine blade grinders and Eaton-Kenway Automated Storage/Retrieval System (AS/RS)
- authored, modified, and maintained production software controlling Hauni-Blohm automated turbine blade grinding machines
- setup and installed DEC MicroVAXs into Hauni-Blohm production machines
- active member of the Grinding Process Improvement Team and Downtime Subcommittee
- worked on other day to day projects supporting internal M.I.S. customers -
Apprentice Software Engineer
Cadre Technologies
(Public Company; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)
May 1991 — December 1991 (8 months)
Co-op industrial assignment while at Rensselaer with goal to focus on software development. Cadre developed a product called Teamwork which was one of the first CASE (Computer Assisted Software Engineering) tools for OOD (object oriented design).
Key contributions-
- researched portability of C run-time library functions and wrote several UNIX shell scripts and reports to help improve writing of portable C code by software engineers
- researched ANSI, POSIX, FIPS, and X/Open C standards with respect to vendor compliance for all major platforms and wrote article that was submitted for publication
- used software metrics tools to perform software metric and reuse study on millions of lines of production C code
- learned and used the CASE software Teamwork for structured design and analysis tasks
- worked on and exposed to many platforms and OSs including SunOS, HP/UX, Domain/OS, Data General DG/UX, IBM AIX and OS/2, DEC ULTRIX and VMS
Todd Swierk’s Education
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North Carolina State University
M.S. , Computer Engineering , 1996 — 1998
GPA 3.73/4.0
Completed 5/10 courses for M.S. degree before career relocation (not completed) -
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
B.S. , Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering , 1988 — 1993
GPA 3.34/4.0
- Activities and Societies:
- Tau Epsilon Phi fraternity
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State University of New York College at Fredonia
1987 — 1988
GPA 3.75/4.0
Early admissions program (dual college/senior year high school). Credits used/transferred to Rensselaer. Initial courses included basic humanities (economics, psychology, writing, computer science, public speaking, etc.).
Additional Information
Todd Swierk’s Interests:
Cycling, digital photography, family, travel, voracious reader, investing and financial planning, music, competitive sporting clays, early technology adopter
Todd Swierk’s Honors:
Nortel Leadership Development Program - Leadership Edge 2005
Nortel Award of Merit - ICP Metro-XA Team
Todd Swierk’s Contact Settings
Interested In:
- career opportunities
- consulting offers
- job inquiries
- reference requests
- getting back in touch
