About the ExpertDr. Vishal Sharma

Dr. Vishal Sharma (Senior Member, IEEE and Fellow, IETE) is an international technologist and entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience in networking and telecom technologies, having lead research, industry, labs, and academia, and having coordinated globally diverse expert teams. He has consulted to clients on four continents – North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and has lived and worked in the United States (on the East and West coasts) and India. Dr. Sharma has 12 issued US patents, 10 IETF RFCs, 4 IEEE Communications Magazine special issues, 2 book chapters, and over 70 scientific publications to his credit. He has considerable standards participation experience & a solid understanding of standards processes.

Dr. Sharma has also been an Associate Professor (3 years) of Electrical Engineering, having taught six courses in areas as diverse as electronics, digital circuits, and electronics labs. to telematics and advanced data networks some to class-sizes exceeding 100 students, has graduated eight students, has guided 25+ seminars and graduate course research projects, and participated in the evaluation of over two-dozen other theses and seminars.

In addition, Dr. Sharma is frequently an invited speaker/keynote speaker, session chair, panel moderator, & panelist at leading industry conferences, and has delivered 145+ workshops, talks, seminars, panels, and webinars, in the US, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

He is Moderator and Group Manager of the flagship Carrier Ethernet LinkedIn Group, focused on discussions of modern packet networking architectures, technologies, trends, and strategy, which has 9,900+ members from 123+ nations, and 2,236+ companies worldwide, representing a microcosm of the global telecommunications eco-system.

His clients have included (among others): Fujitsu, Tellabs, Cariden/Cisco, Mahi Networks, France Telecom, Covad, ETSA/Silk Telecom (Australia), CTS Telecom, Xilinx, Cypress, Wipro, Infosys, and a number of the AM100 law firms on both the East and West coasts of the United States.

Dr. Sharma has experience in patent analysis and evaluation for investment houses, companies, and patent attorneys in a variety of circumstances – portfolio acquisition and expansion, licensing, portfolio value assessment, patent strategy, and patent litigation. His work has included: prior-art research in complex technology patents, claims review/de-construction, claim chart dissection, claim chart construction.

Dr. Sharma has performed infringement analysis, evidence-of-use investigations, technology analysis and violation, and worked on scrutinizing validity. A major contribution of his work has been enabling complex telecommunications & data networking patents (in his areas of expertise) to be succinctly and easily understood by legal and investment experts.

Focus Areas

  • Packet and optical system architectures
  • Network architectures - for packet, optical and data-center networks
  • Protocol design - routing, sigaling, flow-control, and commuciation protoocols for wireline/wireless networks
  • System analysis and optimization
  • Software prototyping
  • Network planning and algorithms
  • Wireless backhaul
  • Wireless broadband - 4G, LTE, 5G
  • Packet-core networks - L2 and L3 VPNs, EVPNs, Mobile network Evolved Packet Core (EPC) 
  • Cloud-based & virtualized networks   
  • Software-defined networks (SDN), and network functions virtualization (NFV)
  • Intellectual asset management

Core Skills

Dr. Sharma’s core skills include:

  • Reverse-engineering of systems, networks, products and applications to locate design, performance, or operational bottlenecks/limitations
  • Deep-dive analysis of advanced technologies, networking systems, and network architectures to identify both positive design choices & practices and fatal design flaws
  • Translating between network-level operation and system-level implementation
  • Sound understanding of wireline, broadband wireless, and optical networking issues and ability to convert them into architectures for services, networks, systems, and chips
  • Grasping customer requirements, interpreting and prioritizing features/options, translating them into high-level architectural specifications and detailed system-level/chip-level operational flows
  • Working seamlessly with engineering/executive management and hardware & software engineering and product marketing teams to realize next-generation products/networks/services
  • Converting novel ideas into patentable inventions.
  • Explaining very complex technology to a diverse audience, and the ability to dive very-deep, technically, into disparate technology areas.

For a short profile and resume, please      Click here

For a detailed CV that lists industry contributions, honors, standards contributions, academic & industry publications, and accomplishments kindly call Dr. Sharma's office at +1 650-641-0082 or +1 408-394-6321.

Client Comments ...

"Thanks again for all your work on the [xxx patent]. ... we had a much more complete and sophisticated view of the technology than [the opposition] and ... our prior art disclosures cornered them." Counsel at leading San-Francisco AM Law 100 firm.

" ... an organized, thoughtful and experienced patent expert. ... am impressed by how quickly he gets to the heart of the matter." Project Manager at a leading technical expert witness referral agency.

"I’m always reluctant to go to a 10 on anything, but I’d definitely give you a 9 or a 9+ - I mean the quality of work was very high... you worked very well from an interpersonal perspective with the team, as well as from a technology perspective. You might find some strong technical people, but they don't have the saviness, the sensitivity to timeframes, and planning, and looking at dependencies [that you did]... I think that was a key differentiator as well." SVP of Product Development at a leading systems vendor for emerging carriers.