Background

I grew up in a suburb of Paris, France, called Saint Cloud and attended the Cours Hattemer in Paris before going to Franklin (École Saint Louis de Gonzague), also in Paris. While in high school, I took a gap year and attended Aloysius Kolleg in Bonn, Bad Godesberg in Germany.

I did my undergraduate studies at ENST, Paris (now called TELECOM Paris), and actually spent my last year in Toulouse in the South-West of France in the Satellite Communications Systems department (don’t ask me why, but it was fun). I did my undergraduate thesis on “Jamming Resistant Multiple Access Methods for Satellite Systems.” (sorry no link, this was written at a time where paper was the only game in town…)

After finishing my undergraduate studies, I attended Caltech, where I received both my MS (1984) and Ph.D. (1986) from the Electrical Engineering department. My Ph.D. was supervised by Prof. Edward Posner and my thesis was titled “Queueing and Traffic in Cellular Radio”. As a point of maybe vain pride, the two journal papers that came out of my thesis have been continuously cited each year since published (according to Google Scholar and at least until 2021).

After graduating from Caltech, I joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where I worked on many aspects related to quality of service in broadband networks for over 12 years. When I left IBM in 1998 I was the manager of the Network Control and Services department. I then started my academic career in the Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania as the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunications Networks. In July 2013, I joined the department of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in Saint Louis as the Harold B. and Adelaide G. Welge Professor as well as its new department chair.

In 2001, I co-founded Ipsum Networks (that eventually morphed into Iptivia) with Raju Rajan, a former colleague from my days at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and spent the next two years at Ipsum on part-time leave of absence from Penn and acting as its CEO. Ipsum pioneered the development of Layer 3 Management, which offers scalable and real-time visibility into the behavior (and problems) of IP networks, and allows rapid root-cause analysis and resolution of the often complex issues that commonly plague IP networks. I returned full-time to Penn in the Fall of 2004.

Thesis papers

1. R. Guerin, “Channel occupancy time distribution in a cellular radio system.” IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, Vol. 36, No. 3, August 1987.
2. R. Guerin, “Queueing-blocking system with two arrival streams and guard channels.” IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. 36, No. 2, February 1988.