Pat Calhoun

Pat brings a wealth of industry experience and technical expertise as well as a significant background in standards-based to his work as CTO of the Ethernet and Wireless Technology Group at Cisco Systems. Prior to joining Cisco Systems, Pat was co-founder and CTO at Airespace, where he was architect and software lead for the award-winning LWAPP WLAN Controller, which resulted in a dramatic shift in WLAN architectures.

Before that, Pat headed the Sun Laboratories fourth generation research project, which focused on a next-generation core and radio access network (RAN) wireless network using IP only devices. Many of the ideas generated from this project were used to form the Mobile Wireless Internet Forum (MWIF) core network architecture and IP in the RAN working group, as well as the Third-Generation Partnership Project 2's (3GPP2) all-IP architecture ad hoc group.

Pat managed an advanced development team focused on mobility and security at US Robotics/3Com, where he also acted as an architect for the NetServer, the routing module in the Total Control Chassis. While managing the development team, Pat designed Virtual Tunneling Protocol (VTP), which was the first Internet virtual private network (VPN) access router service deployed.

Pat's involvement in the development of standards and protocols includes contributing to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards since 1994, chaired the IETF seamless mobility working group and co-authored PPTP, L2TP and the Diameter protocol, which is the follow-on to RADIUS. He also served as editor of the AAA Working Group, which oversaw the standardization of Diameter. Most recently, Pat co-authored the Lightweight Access Point Protocol (LWAPP), which is the basis for the upcoming CAPWAP standard, a standard protocol between Access Points and WLAN controllers. Pat also chaired the IEEE's 802.11v task group, which focuses on wireless network management.