Ian F. Akyildiz

Ian F. Akyildiz (born Ilhan Fuat Akyildiz on April 11, 1954, in Istanbul, Turkey) received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, in 1978, 1981 and 1984, respectively.

Akyildiz started his research work on queueing networks models in the early 1980s.

His PhD thesis (1984) was entitled “Multiprocessor Systems with Process Communication” where he developed queuing network models to analyze the performance of the multiprocessor systems which were important subject in the early 1980s.

In particular, he developed queueing network models for process communication where the buffers were finite and blocking/losses of messages could occur.

His paper was the first which was an original work introducing the duality of the state spaces of queueing networks with blocking/finite buffers versus queueing networks without blocking kind of mapping of state space to each other, and accordingly obtaining exact product form solution for two nodes.

Based on this novel duality concept, Dr. Akyildiz showed in an approximate duality (mapping) of state spaces between queuing networks with and without blocking having arbitrary number of nodes.

He then derived the approximate throughput formula and also derived approximate product form solutions in.

He published many other papers on queuing network models.

He is the Ken Byers Chair Professor Emeritus in Telecommunications, Past Chair of the Telecom group at the ECE and the Director of the Broadband Wireless Networking Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology (1985–2020).

Currently, he is the President and CTO of the Truva Inc. since March 1989.

He retired from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech in 2021 after almost 35 years service as Ken Byers Chair Professor in Telecommunications and Chair of the Telecom group.

These contributions lead him to obtain the IEEE Fellow rank in 1996, and in particular to performance analysis of computer communication networks.

In 1997 Ian Akyildiz with his colleagues at the YURIE systems designed and implemented the first adaptive forward-error-correction solution on the link layer of their wireless ATM switch providing high reliability in wireless ATM networks with very low bit data rates used in battlefield scenarios.

The founder of the Yurie Systems, Jeong H. Kim, received the entrepreneur of the year award in 1997 and Yurie Systems was acquired by Lucent for 1 Billion US Dollars in 1998.

Ian Akyildiz significantly contributed to mobility and resource management of 2G and 3G cellular systems in the 90s.

His contributions to mobility and resource management gained him the ACM Fellow rank in 1997.

He proposed many handoff management, location registration, and paging schemes for the design of 3G and 4G wireless systems, and all of his papers have been published in top notch journals and conferences between 1998 and 2000.

His paper titled “Mobility Management in Next-Generation Wireless Systems” was invited to be included in Proceedings of IEEE, and is the most cited paper on mobility management in the literature, and became “the” main reading material for the first course on mobile networks in many universities.

Ian Akyildiz started to use the notion “4G” wireless networks in 1999-2000 through his papers and keynote speeches.

He clearly pointed out the requirements for heterogeneous 4G wireless systems, such as anywhere/anytime wireless connectivity with hundreds of Mbps bandwidth per mobile user for both data and multimedia services.

Consequently, the first adaptive protocol suite framework for Next Generation Wireless Internet was supported by NSF (National Science Foundation) (2000-2005) NSF #:ANI-0117840.

His early insights on the need to enable a single mobile terminal to seamlessly communicate over heterogeneous wireless access systems such as wireless LANs, 3G cellular networks, and satellite networks are seminal contributions to 4G systems.These ideas were the forerunner of the dynamic spectrum access and cognitive radio networks.

The culmination of his research work on this topic gained him the 2003 ACM SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award for his "pioneering contributions in the area of mobility and resource management for wireless communication networks", in September 2003.

Akyildiz, in collaboration and with support of NASA, developed several routing algorithms and a novel transport control protocol called TCP Peach to realize practical satellite networks.

He significantly contributed towards the development and realization of high altitude long operation (HALO) networks for providing broadband wireless network access which was implemented by Angel Technologies and Raytheon, exploited by invention disclosures and ). HALO was the forerunner of the current UAVs and Drones and Cubesats research. Couple decades later many countries are working on the directions of the HALO project.

This paper is the first to comprehensively put forward the design principles and system reference model for HALO networks, which is a broadband wireless metropolitan area network with a star topology, whose solitary hub is located in the atmosphere above the service area at an altitude higher than commercial airline traffic.

With the extremely timely publication of the first and most comprehensive roadmap paper on wireless sensor networks, Akyildiz made this new research area known to the entire world.

Many researchers, who work on sensor networks, has started by reading his paper.

Hence, this publication has received more than 41,000 citations in 20 years.

Moreover, this paper received the best tutorial paper award from IEEE Communications society in 2003.

Thanks to his paper, the area has attracted significantly amplified attention and become focus of research and engineering efforts towards realizing wide range of sensor network applications.In 20 years, the research in this area has resulted in billions of dollars of investment from both government and private sector, educated thousands of students, and helped establish hundreds of companies.

A patent for this solution was obtained in 2006.

A technical paper describing the link layer design on this low bit rate wireless ATM switch was published.

He founded the N3Cat (NanoNetworking Center) at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, in Barcelona, Spain, in 2008.

He advised 48 PhD students, and 13 PostDocs, 52 visiting researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, and 15 Master students at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain.

His current research interests are in 6G/7G, Wireless Systems, TeraHertz Communication, Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces, Nanonetworks, Internet of Space Things/CUBESATs, Internet of BioNanoThings, Molecular Communication and Underwater Communication.

According to Google Scholar as of April 2023, his h-index is 135 and the total number of citations to his papers is 140+K.

Dr. Akyildiz was the Megagrant Research Leader and Advisor to the Director of the Institute for Information Transmission Problems at the Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow, Russia, (2018-2020).

He serves on the advisory board of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates since June 1, 2020.

He is also an adjunct professor with the University of Helsinki since 2021, University of Iceland since 2020, and University of Cyprus since 2017.