In this community member profile we highlight Gabriel Arrobo, a Research Scientist at Intel Labs, Intel Corporation. He is based in Hillsboro, Oregon and is an active contributor in the Aether community.
Gabriel’s main contributions to ONF’s Aether project include: implementation of the GTPu Path Monitoring feature in the UPF (user and control planes); productization of a network application to measure end-to-end latency in Aether; improvement to the documentation for Aether-in-a-Box (AiaB) and the UPF.
“My experience working within the Aether community has been very positive due to the support from Intel colleagues and former ONF’s employees, including Ajay Thakur, Andy Bavier, Badhri Padmanabhan, Woojoong Kim, Kushal Mittal, and current ONF employees such as Amol Jaikar.”
Gabriel graduated in 2004 cum laude with an undergraduate degree in Engineering - Electronics and Telecommunications (5-year program), followed by an Engineering Diploma in 2006 in Inter-networking (1-year graduate studies); both degrees he received from Escuela Politecnica Nacional, in Quito, Ecuador. He also holds a Master of Business Administration, with a concentration in strategy and enterprise policy from the Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Toluca, Mexico which he received in 2008. In 2010, he was awarded a Masters of Science, and in 2012, a doctoral degree, both in Electrical Engineering from the University of South Florida, in Tampa.
Following graduation from college, Gabriel joined the "Corporacion Nacional de Telecommunicaciones" (formerly ANDINATEL), a telecommunications service provider, where he held various positions ranging from staff engineer to manager and worked on optical and wireless transport backbone networks, network management systems, wireless multi-access, telephone switching, network routing. He wanted to continue his formal education and decided to move to the United States to study a master’s degree. During his studies, he had an opportunity to work on his doctoral degree and he conducted research on reliable wireless networks. After that, he stayed at the University as a Postdoctoral Scholar and focused on developing a Wi-Fi-based wireless video camera system for minimally invasive surgeries. After that, he joined Newfield Wireless (Tektronix/NetScout) to work on calibrating RF propagation models for LTE macro and small cells using the company’s proprietary and off-the-shelf software tools which included Newfield’s TruePath, Atoll, GeoPlan and PlanetEV. He also did research on LTE scanner data (RSRP, RSRQ, RS-CINR) to calibrate high quality path loss models and perform statistical analysis of the field measurement data. In 2016, Gabriel joined Intel to work on Wi-Fi differentiations by creating value above the Wi-Fi (MAC/PHY) layer(s) with the goal of improving user quality of experience (QoE). Following this, he joined a cellular network standardization team at Intel to work on innovations for B5G and 6G.
Gabriel is now part of the Telecom Systems Research (TSR) lab at Intel Labs, where the team members investigate different aspects of the telecommunication systems such as core network, wireless access (SD-RAN), orchestration, quality of service, power savings, etc. A few team members are focused on the development of the UPF. Currently Gabriel is working with AiaB for deploying more than one slice. He is also working on the UPF to add additional QoS-related features and will be working on ONF’s SD-RAN project on aspects related to the near-RT RIC and xApps.
In time away from work, Gabriel enjoys traveling with his wife and two kids. His wife keeps the family busy on weekends with an array of family activities. At the end of last summer, Gabriel and his family went on their first camping trip in east Oregon to camp and experience seeing the Milky Way at night. Since then, he and his family have been spending more time camping and enjoying nature and the night sky.
Something that people may not know about Gabriel… he was born in Loja, Ecuador,a small city located on the border with Peru. He loves Ecuadorian food, but unfortunately cooking it is not his thing. Luckily for him, his wife cooks most of his favorite dishes, but his favorite dish is repe lojano, a traditional soup from Loja which is one of the few dishes his wife does not cook. Therefore, Gabriel takes to the kitchen to cook this dish when he is able to find green bananas (not an easy find in Oregon). He keeps the recipe a secret, even from his wife, but “he cooks the best repe lojano”, according to his wife.
