Papers

All of the papers below are in Adobe Acrobat format.  To read them you need the free Acrobat reader, available by clicking the icon, below.

I have listed the papers I think will be most popular first.

Many of these papers have my old e-mail address - I haven't gone through them and modified the e-mail address.  My new e-mail address is mike@michael-henderson.us

“Introduction to Optical Networks” 2000.  Starts with the basic physics of light, then uses these principals to explain how lasers and photo detectors operate.  Discusses optical fiber and the various operating bands.  Explains how optical communications is used in the network.  Gives a basic introduction to SONET and digital wrapper.  This has been a very popular paper, with almost 750 downloads (from the Mindspeed web site) during one peak month.  Averages several hundred downloads per month.  A companion presentation is available here.

“Fundamentals of SONET/SDH” 2001.  Gives a detailed explanation of SONET and SDH, down to the octet level.  Also discusses SONET rings and recovery from fiber and node failures.  A companion presentation is available here.  All of the presentations noted on this page are available in PowerPoint, with speaker notes.  Send me an e-mail to request them in PowerPoint.
This paper was used as Chapter 6 in the book Telecommunications Technology Handbook by Daniel Minoli, published in 2003.

“DS1/DS3 and E1/E3 Framing and Multiplexing” 2002.  Describes how digital communications signals are multiplexed.  Specifically this paper looks at the North American DS1 through DS3 and the European E1 through E3 frame and multiplexing structures.  Originally, these were not plesiochronous signals so multiplexing required a technique to handle the different clock rates of the signals being multiplexed.  The line codes used for each rate are described in an appendix.

"Fundamentals of Telecommunications - Voice"  and

"Fundamentals of Telecommunications - Data" 2014.  I worked on these presentation in 2014 and never really finished them.  But there's some good information in them and that's why I'm putting them here on the web site.  They're fairly large files.

"The Personal Web Server" 2003.  Describes a way of enhancing a residential gateway to include a web server function.  This product would allow residential broadband customers to host their personal web sites without the disk space limitations of most broadband service providers.

“Differential Equations for High School Students” 2002.  Provides the mathematical background for a high school student to understand the basics of differential equations.  Starts with a discussion of the natural number e, then gives a detailed explanation of complex numbers, the complex number plane, and algebraic manipulation of complex numbers, leading to Euler’s equation.  A short review of differential calculus is given leading to the actual discussion of differential equations.  A additional paper, "Working with Logarithms", is a supplement to this paper.

“Forward Error Correction in Optical Networks” 2000. Explains the forward error correction techniques now standardized in ITU recommendations G.707 and G.709.  The paper was written about the time G.709 was first approved and does not include the changes to G.709 since February 2001.  A companion presentation is available here.

“Eliminating the Last Mile Bottleneck” 1999.  A queuing analysis of voice over HDSL, assuming that silence suppression is used on the voice channels.  A closed form M/M/1 analysis is provided, along with a non-closed form simulation.  A companion presentation is available here.

“Voice over ADSL” 2000.  Extends the analysis done in “Eliminating the Last Mile Bottleneck” to ADSL circuits.

“56Kbps Data Transmission across the PSTN” 1997.  This paper was written during the “56K War” before the V.90 standard was developed.  It explains how modems work and how 56K technology differs from traditional modems.  This paper received very wide circulation and was posted on many ISP sites during the early days of 56Kbps modems.