I was educated in New Delhi, India, doing my schooling at Ramjas School, R.K. Puram and Delhi Public School, R.K. Puram and my undergraduate degreee in Computer Science at IIT Delhi. I did my graduate work at UC Berkeley where my advisor was Prof. Domenico Ferrari. As a graduate student I interned at Xerox PARC with Scott Shenker in 1988 and at Center 1127 at AT&T Bell Laboratories (now a part of Lucent) with Sam Morgan in 1989 and 1990.. My thesis on Fair Queueing and Packet-Pair Flow Control won the Sakrison Prize.

Conventional wisdom states that after a PhD one has three career choices: work in a research lab, join a startup, or join academia. Fortuitously, my career has included stints in all three.

I joined Center 1127 at AT&T Bell Laboratories in September 1991. I really enjoyed the heady mixture of cutting-edge research and hands-on work at the labs, and my five years there were an amazing learning experience. It didn't hurt that AT&T was there to pick up the tab for any research that fit my fancy, ranging from talking heads (speech-assisted animation) to telepresence (internet-acessible cars). My main research was in helping to design and implement a wide-area ATM network called XUNET. I also took time off to teach for a semester at IIT Delhi in 1993, at Columbia in 1995, and to write a graduate-level textbook in computer networking.

When AT&T broke up in 1995, many of us decided to move to academia. I joined Cornell as an Associate Professor in 1996. Whille I was there I started a new course, CS 519 ("Engineering Computer Networks") based on my book, started a research group (Cornell Network Research Group), and helped to organize a computer science research fair (Bits On Our Mind, or BOOM). My research at Cornell was in the area of network performance management, and, in particular, on network simulation. My students Rosen Sharma, Snorri Gylfason, Wilson Huang, and I came up with a new technique for network simulation that we embodied in the Entrapid simulator. This simulator served as the basis for a startup, Ensim that we incorporated in June 1998.

Ensim grew rapidly to about twenty people in about six months. We set up offices in a shopping complex near Cornell and started working on our first product. Our first rude shock was to find out that no one wanted to pay any money (at least to us) for a network simulator. Second, we found that the only way to raise money and retain our employees was to move to Silicon Valley. We moved the company to Silicon Valley in May 1999 and I moved with it. With high hopes, lots of funding, and with a slew of ideas on network and operating system virtualization, I moved full time to Ensim in July 1999.

My five years at Ensim were a great learning opportunity. I learnt what it takes to translate research ideas to products, and how products enter markets. I finally figured out the difference between marketing and sales (!) and how money works. At Ensim I did everything from wiring telephones and pre- and post-sales technical support to corporate strategy and boardroom politics. It was fun, but after five years I decided it was time to return to academia.

I have been at Waterloo since July 2003, working on something I call 'tetherless computing' (this term is due to folks at RPI -- I liked it well enough to copy it). I hold a Canada Research Chair and am looking forward to doing interesting work in this exciting field of research.