Geoffrey M Garner received his SB degree in Physics from MIT in 1976, SM degrees in Nuclear Engineering and Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 1978, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 1985. After receiving the PhD, he was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories and then Lucent Technologies, and became a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in 1999. Since 2003 Geoff has been a consultant in telecommunications and networking, specialising in network timing, jitter, synchronisation and related standards development. He has consulted for Huawei Technologies since 2008 and has also consulted for Samsung, Broadcom, Marvell, Hirschmann, Siemens, and Internet Photonics.
On joining AT&T, Geoff worked on data network design and performance tools. In 1992 he began working on network timing and synchronisation; and later service-level performance and ATM performance and QoS. His work included the development of standards for jitter and synchronisation performance and transmission error performance for SONET/SDH and OTN networks as well as ATM performance for B-ISDN networks. He was editor of the ITU-T Recommendationson ATM adaptation layer performance. The timing/sync work continued when he became a consultant; and in 2004 he worked on development of a simulator for Optical Burst Switching Network Performance. In 2005, as a consultant, his work expanded to include timing and synchronisation packet-based transport using IEEE 1588 and its profiles for telecom networks and for Ethernet and WiFi networks carrying time-sensitive traffic, IEEE 802.1AS. The work in all these areas included modeling of equipment level timing performance, development of simulators and simulations to support standards and other developments.
Geoff was the Rapporteur of the Transmission Error Performance Question in ITU-T SG13 from 2001-2004. He has been a member of the IEEE Registration Authority Committee (RAC) since 2007 and has been the editor of IEEE 802.1AS, and now its revision, since 2006. He was a member of the ITU-T Recommendation specifying jitter and wander in the OTN (G.8251) from 1999-2002; and again from 2015 to the present day. Geoff is also editor of standards for time (G.781.1) and frequency (G.781) synchronisation layer functions, and of the technical report in ITU-T SG15 that documents modeling and simulation work for packet-based time transport. Geoff is author or co-author of four magazine articles, one journal article, and 14 technical conference papers. He is a contributing author to a book on Optical Networking Standars and has delivered tutorials or presentation on various aspects of timing and sync and related standards at 12 conferences/workshops. He is a co-author of 13 patents and is primary author of over 300 standards contributions.