Hitoshi Obara

Hitoshi Obara (M'89) received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in telecommunications engineering and the Ph.D. degree in information science from Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, in 1978, 1980, and 2001, respectively. He worked with the NTT Labs as a Senior Research Engineer in 1985–2001. He engaged in the development of a fiber-optic HDTV transmission system. He led research of input-queueing ATM switches and invented several advanced scheduling algorithms based on the VOQ scheme. He was involved in the ATM crossconnect system project under the joint research with Bell Labs in 1992 and contributed to realizing a growable high-capacity ATM switch fabric. In his later years at NTT, he created a number of evolutionary architectures for WDM networks and WDM crossconnect systems (e.g., the multifiber WDM express network, the virtually crosstalk-free multistage wavelength router, the hybrid WDM add/drop ring network, and the helical WDM ring network). He was a Visiting Researcher with the Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria, in 2003. He is currently an Associate Professor with the EEE Department, Akita University, Akita, Japan. His primary research area has been optical networks, switching/crossconnect systems, and communication protocols, where he is the author or coauthor of more than 40 refereed journal papers and holds 30 patents. Dr. Obara is a member of the IEICE and SICE.