Anietie Victor Essiet

Why did you decide to study a masters at the University of Leeds?

After my undergraduate I had to work for about eleven years in the Telecommunications sector in my country. My interactions with people in the industry inspired in me a desire to study again and become an expert in my field.  Choosing the right university was difficult but I eventually settled for Leeds University due to its high ranking and reputation. It was one of the most expensive given the fact that I had no scholarship, however I made up my mind that whatever happens I will come to Leeds and today I have not regretted that decision.

What has been the best aspect of studying on your course and at the University so far and why?

Prior to coming to Leeds I had attended three different universities at different times in my country. My experience at the university of Leeds is incomparable to all the years I spent studying at different times in my country; these are the reasons; the facilities at the university of Leeds such as the conducive teaching space equipped with recording facilities that help students to catch up on either missed or topics they did not understand well while in class, the libraries equipped with learning resources to help students achieve their learning objectives, the  well-equipped 24-hour IT clusters available to students for independent studies, organized seminars and industrial visits to help broaden the student’s scope in some areas of interest, and lots of other facilities and initiatives put in place and at the disposal of students to help them make the best out of their time in the university,

Tell us about some of the exciting projects you have completed.

I am still working on the design of a high-performance internet Router and hoping to complete it by the end of August 2018. The project is interesting and has broaden my understanding of router architecture. By this project I have come to understand that the performance of a router largely depends on the speed of its engine which is the switch fabric and also the efficiency of the scheduling algorithm used to match inputs to outputs that the inputs have a queue cell with. Buffer organization also plays a crucial role in a router architecture; you could choose where you want packets to queue depending on what you want to achieve. Your architecture could be input queued, output queued or shared memory, but you need to consider the trade-offs with each design function; input queued follows a first-in-first-out (FIFO) traffic pattern and suffers from head-of-line blocking (HoL), which has been mitigated with the introduction of virtual output queues (VOQs) at each input. Output queued on the other hand records better throughput but cannot be scaled because it requires high memory bandwidth which makes it not feasible to be implemented in commercial scale. Again using a crossbar switch architecture instead of bus allows for distributed and independent scheduling and eliminates input and output contention. The above approaches are what I considered in my router design.

What does Leeds as a city have to offer students?

Leeds is an exciting place to be and with good time management, you can enjoy Leeds while at the same time taking your studies serious.  There are several exciting places to visit at different times.

What are your ambitions for the future?

I want to garner more working experience in the field of telecommunications and hope to contest the presidency of my country at the right time. I believe with the right education and experience I will be better equipped to develop my country.

What experiences at Leeds do you think will help you in your future career?

One of the best experiences I have gotten while studying at Leeds is time management and another one is persistency in seeking solutions to problems.

What would you say to students coming to do the same course?

I would welcome them to a world of self discovery, they won't leave the University of Leeds the same way they came.