Pieter-Tjerk de Boer

I'm an assistant professor (Dutch: ``universitair docent'') in the  Design and Analysis of Communication Systems (DACS) group at the Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science department of the University of Twente. Before this, I studied physics (graduating in 1996), and obtained a PhD in computer science in 2000, both also at the University of Twente.

The glass ball in the picture is part of the KIvI Telecommunicatieprijs that I was awarded for my Ph.D. thesis.

Research

My research is mostly concerned with queueing models of telecommunication systems. In particular, I'm studying techniques for the efficient simulation of rare events in such models. Events like buffer overflows should be rare in a well-designed telecommunication network, but estimating their probabilities using standard simulation techniques is computationally inefficient, so special techniques like importance sampling and splitting or restart are being developed.

You can read much more about this in my Ph.D. thesis.
Or, if you know Dutch, read this introduction for non-specialists (10 pages, PDF format).

An important method used in my research is the Cross-Entropy method, which has its own home page.

Furthermore, more recently I have been looking into several aspects of TCP performance in real networks, together with several students; we have done measurements, and are analysing data from the Twente traffic repository.

A list of recent publications is available.

Teaching

In the 2008/2009 academic year, I'm responsible for the following courses: (the links lead to the university course information database VIST)

• 262000 Telematics Networks
• Cryptography part of 265400 Network Security

Furthermore, I'll be involved (together with other lecturers) in the following courses:

• 261000 Telematica-Systemen en -Toepassingen
• 215000 Academische Vaardigheden Informatica 1
• 262031 Performance Evaluation 2
• 262020 Selected topics on telematics

The course "TEL-P-project" (269100) will not be taught in its old form anymore this year. Students who still need to take this course can contact me. Most likely, a renewed version of the course will start in the 2009 or 2010 academic year, depending on the planning of the new INF/TEL curriculum.

Amateur radio

My main hobby is amateur radio. Information on some of my amateur-radio related projects, including several computer programs for Linux and other unix-like systems, is available at my amateur radio page. The university's amateur radio club ETGD has its own homepage (in Dutch).

Miscellaneous stuff

A couple of things I wrote about miscellaneous subjects, that perhaps might be of interest to someone.

Contact

Dr. ir. Pieter-Tjerk de Boer
University of Twente
Design and Analysis of Communication Systems
Faculty for Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands.

Phone: +31 53 4894327
E-mail: ptdeboer@cs.utwente.nl
Room: Zi-5016