---

Tsong-Ho Wu and Richard C.L. Lau Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), Red Bank Tsong-Ho Wu and Richard C.L. Lau developed new approaches to designing and building "self-healing" ring networks that can automatically withstand a cut link. Self-healing rings have emerged as the techniques of choice in providing cost-effective and reliable protection against fiber link and node failures in the public network. Sales of SONET ring equipment were estimated to exceed $2 billion in 1996. When the Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) standards were first proposed and debated in the 1980’s, most researchers focused on the protocols and specifications. However, Wu and Lau noted that since one strand of fiber carries so much vital information, survivability and self-healing would surface as a critical issue in SONET networks. Guided by this vision, the two inventors proposed the basic concepts of self-healing rings. They played a leading role in working with numerous organizations in the industry to develop the detailed control algorithms and protocols, and submitted a suite of contributions to different standards bodies that led to the deployment of their protection schemes. The SONET self-healing ring network is a critical component in today’s national information infrastructure because it provides the required level of fault tolerance and robustness to hundreds of millions of users. Tsong-Ho Wu received a bachelor’s degree from the National Taiwan University and master’s and doctoral degrees from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Richard Lau holds bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.