Don Gillies

I coined this definition in 1991 or 1992, modeling it after a famous essay - can you guess which one?

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 Satelite 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 to stream video on the Internet. I patented broadcast adaptive video streaming in 2011. 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 for optimizing DASH video playback user satisfaction.
• 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. 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

• Don Gillies, Weilin Wang, and Michael Nova, System and method for identifying nodes in a wireless mesh network, granted 2006-06-27, 7,069,483.
• 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)
• Cheng, Raymond C., and Donald W. Gillies. Blueprint for a Hard Real-Time File System. Proceedings of the 8th Euromicro Workshop on Real-Time Systems, June 12th, 1996. Also in CICSR Tech Report CICSR-TR95-05. Postscript (1.97 MB), University of British Columbia.
• Gillies, Donald W. Scheduling tasks with AND/OR precedence constraints. (PhD Thesis, University of Illinois, January 1993). PDF (662 KB)
• Gillies, Donald W. and Jane W.S. Liu. Scheduling tasks with AND/OR precedence constraints. SIAM Journal on Computing, vol. 24, no. 4, pp 797-810, August 1995. PDF (249 KB)
• Gillies, Donald W. Pipelined Bursts in Real-Time Scheduling, November 1998. Postscript (234 KB)
• Gillies, Donald W. and Jane W.S. Liu. Greed in Resource Scheduling. Acta Informatica (1991) vol. 28, pp. 755-775. PDF (905 KB).
• Bettati, R., D. Gillies, C.C. Han, K.J. Lin, C.L. Liu, J.W.S. Liu and W.K. Shih. Recent results in real-time scheduling. In: Foundations of real-time computing: scheduling and resource management, Andre M. van Tilborg and Gary M. Koob (eds). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, 1991, pp. 129-156.
• Shih, W.K. , J. W. S. Liu, J. Y. Chung and D. W. Gillies, Scheduling Imprecise Computations to Minimize Total Error. Microprocessing and Microprogramming, 27, pp. 767-774, 1989.
• Xerox Corporation (Gillies, Donald W. and Redell, David D.) , "Mailing Protocols (Xerox System Integration Standard).", Xerox Network Systems Institute Report No. XNSS 148805, Stamford, Connecticut, 1988 (114 pp.).
• Gillies, Donald W. Improved network security with a trusted email relay, B.S. Thesis, Massachussetts Institute of Technology, 1984. Describes PC/IP nTCP: The first multi-connection TCP for the IBM PC, used to found FTP Software, Inc. and NetManage. The PC/IP package is available at several sites including Simtel, although the source code is harder to find these days (contact gillies@cs.ubc.ca for the source code).

Invited Talks

• "Stable resource mangement for real-time systems," MIT, 2000.
• "Engineering a real-time network protocol for Globalstar," Texas A&M University, 1999.
• "Engineering a real-time network protocol for Globalstar," University of Texas, 1999.
• "Design rules for real-time software layout," Harvey Mudd College, November 1996.
• "Burst Processing in hard real-time systems," New Jersey Institute of Technology, January 1996.
• "Burst Processing in hard real-time systems," University of Illinois, July 1995.

Reviewing

• ICDCS program committee, 2001.
• ICECCS program committee, 1996.
• ICDCS program committee, 1995.
• Invited Reviewer for Prentice-Hall (computer architecture book proposal), 1993.
• Invited Revieweer for Packt (Grosvenor), "Kubernetes - an Enterprise Guide, 3rd edition", 2024.
• Journal reviewer, IEEE Trans. Software Engineering, IEEE Trans. Computers, SIAM J. Discrete Math.