Work Profile:
The work profile was two-pronged.
In my capacity as a summer intern:
As a summer intern in the Advance Technology Center of HCL Tech., I worked with the pre-sales and marketing support team. The pre-sales group was working on developing sales/marketing kits for the use of the Account Managers, to aid them in understanding of the domains of expertise of HCL Technologies. Four domains were identified:
1) ASIC
2) Embedded Systems
3) Systems Programming
4) Networking and Telecommunications
I was given the responsibility of coming up with the kit on Networking and Telecommunications. This required me to gain an insight into the specific areas in which HCL had worked and was presently working. As a part of this exercise, I interacted with a team working on Networked PABX devices. The team was resolving issues in adding data functionality to existing voice devices. In the existing (voice) PABX devices, add-on cards were incorporated, to enhance them and add data functionality. The add-on cards required software to be written. A third party stack was procured, and the performance issues encountered were being resolved.
After a through understanding of the project and the issues involved in it, I came up with a white paper on the Networked PABX domain. It discussed the technical details and standards and protocols used in the domain. I also applied my understanding of the domain, the market dynamics and the direction of ongoing research in the field to come up with some future prospects for HCL.
Finally the kit included the white paper and write-up on the domain along with sections on market study, statistics, Standards and Protocols used, and HCL’s strengths and capabilities in the specialized area. A case study was included to summarize the kit.
As an additional input, I prepared a presentation on the Networked PABX domain, which was approved and made a part of the kit.
Under the provisions of the NDA (Non-disclosure Agreement) I signed, I am not at a liberty to re-produce the kit.
In my capacity as a summer
trainee:
As a summer trainee, I was given training in the fields of networking, internetworking and programming in the UNIX environment.
1.
Networking and
Internetworking
I underwent a training session on Networks and Internetworks. The training discussed networking basics, LANS, WANS and various TCP/IP suite protocols( IP/Ipv6, TCP, UDP, PPP, RIP, MGCP etc.)
Through my interaction with the team working on Networked PABX devices, I also got a chance to see various protocols being implemented to provide data functionality to the devices, and inter-network them. Such protocols as the following were implemented, to provide certain server capabilities to the PABXs, to help them in handling data and to help them inter-network.
PPP (Point to Point Protocol) handles the inter-operable link negotiations and multi-protocol datagram delivery across synchronous and asynchronous serial point to point links.
MP (Multilink Protocol) is responsible for the dynamic creation and management of “bundles” of PPP links for the purpose of increasing, on demand, overall bandwidth between neighboring systems. Authentication, encapsulation, fragmentation/reassemble, NCP options processing and dynamic mapping of PPP port to MP bundle services are all provided, permitting a very wide range of operations.
NAT (Network Address Translation) provides an answer to the address shortage faced by many enterprises today. A single IP address can provide the gateway to the WWW without changing the existing enterprise addressing scheme.
Dynamic Host
Configuration Protocol provides the IP addresses from a remote server. It
allows dynamic configuration of a device upon boot. The DHCP client requests
and subsequently obtains initialization parameters from a DHCP server. DHCP is
based on the Bootstrap protocol. The participating DHCP hosts can inter-operate
with BOOTP peers. The BOOTP relay agent serves to relay DHCP and BOOTP host
requests to the DHCP server.
BOD (Bandwidth on
Demand) : The BAP and BACP architecture manages the dynamic bandwidth
allocation in Multi link Point-to-Point Protocol (MP/PPP) bundles. Following
issues were resolved:
RIP (Routing Information Protocol) manages a table with an entry for every possible destination in the system. And it periodically, sends a routing update to every neighbor. Basically it is implemented with distant vector algorithm.
CCP
CCP (Compression
Control Protocol) brings data compression services to PPP based networks. CCP
provides the extension to PPP device driver for negotiating the type of data
compression algorithm to be used as well as the data compressor for several of
the algorithm defined by CCP. In the stack it operates over MP for
compression/decompression on bundles level. Algorithms supported are Predictor
Type1, Type2, BSD LZW compress.
2.
Programming in the UNIX environment
I was given an assignment of 20 questions on the use of files, sockets, signals and IPC etc. in the UNIX environment. I completed the work assigned to the supervisor’s satisfaction. I have attached the assignment and the completed report on the given task.