- Prashant S. Soman has over 2 years of experience in the mobile and wireless communication industry, with expertise in network stack deployment, troubleshooting, and design of wireless and VoIP systems. - He currently works as a Customer Engineer at Qualcomm Technologies, providing support to carriers and OEMs from solution design to product deployment. - He led the invention of a patent-pending technology for power-efficient network search by mobile devices.

1. Prashant S. Soman
Address: 8550 Costa Verde Blvd, #5213, San Diego, CA - 92122
Phone: 480 273 9104
prashant.soman@gmail.com
SUMMARY
 2+ years of experience in the mobile and wireless communication industry. Part of small agile team focused on delivering solutions to customers
 Expertise in network stack and deployment, troubleshooting design of wireless and VoIP systems for customers
 Lead inventor of patent (pending) for power-efficient network search by mobile device.
SKILLS
Software Languages: C, Java, Perl, MATLAB Computer Software: QXDM, Wireshark, Eclipse, Android SDK, MATLAB v7.01
Network Protocols: LTE, UMTS, HSPA, TCP, UDP, IP, DNS Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, Android Test Equipment: Oscilloscopes, Function generators, Logic Analyzers, Spectrum Analyzers Languages: English, Hindi, Marathi, German
EXPERIENCE
Qualcomm Technologies Inc., San Diego, California
Customer Engineer May 2012 – Current
 Integration and deployment of Qualcomm’s VoIP solution inside carrier’s network
 Coordinated with internal engineering teams for information, release validation and debug support
 Supported operators and handset OEM / ODMs from solution design and implementation phase till product deployment
 Inter-operability testing (IOT) with third-party equipment and characterization of VoIP performance in LTE, UMTS, HSPA, and 1xEVDO networks
 Interface between customer and internal teams to provide technical customer feedback
 Develop customer presentations providing guidance and knowledge transfer of VoIP platform
 Drafting handset inter-operability test plans and preparing test reports
 Provide on-site support and perform integration testing on customer premises in Mexico city, Mexico, Washington D.C., Dallas, Texas
Role in product deployment cycle
a. Design
 Helped design and test key feature which provides real time feedback of link quality metric between 2 VoIP terminals
 Worked with software engineering to accommodate OEM’s ‘fast-bootup’ feature on handset which resolved compatibility issues
 Engaged with OEM to resolve Android audio routing issue
 Extracted latency statistics from field data which were critical in design of audio de-jittering algorithm
b. Deployment and System Integration
 Performed extensive lab and drive-testing in field during pre-commercial testing of solution to identify inter-operability, end- to-end performance, media issues
 Provided information and guidance to internal engineering teams based on end-user perspective testing and subjective voice quality testing in the field
 Root cause analysis of modem logs to determine call setup failures, call drops due RRC connection failures, RLF failures, UE handover failures
 Identified flaw in RAN vendor’s LTE page scheduling implementation during network optimization effort, which incurred call setup delay of 5 sec in ~10% of the VoIP calls
 Debugged end-to-end networking problems involving DNS, TCP/UDP, IP protocols
c. Commercial and Post-deployment Support
 Extensive experience with troubleshooting WCDMA (RRC, RLC, MAC) issues and optimization with RAN vendor
 Recommended a work-around to 3GPP limitation of international PLMN roaming which improved experience of customers near the US-Mexico border
 Characterized and identified bug audio concurrency module which helped resolve critical customer issue
 Analyzed and found root-cause of RLC HFN mismatch issues which exposed bugs in RAN ciphering algorithm
 Worked closely with network equipment provider and operator to optimize WCDMA network handovers which was affecting audio quality

2. Miscellaneous
 Worked with Qualcomm’s patent team and third party legal counsel to file a patent for a power-efficient method used by mobile devices to search for networks
 Qualcomm’s Impaqt employee hackathon – Member of winning team which designed and implemented an open-ended playing card game using the AllJoyn™ platform
 The objective was to provide a no-rules virtual environment consisting of decks of cards and virtual table, to players with mobile devices on a WLAN network
Ginger.io, Cambridge, MA
Engineering Intern (Android Development) June 2011- Aug 2011
 Developed a proprietary Android application using Java
 Debugged the application using LogCat/DDMS/Traceview and generated debugging reports
 Made significant improvement in scheduling module of the app
 Participated in discussions related to product packaging (engineering, marketing etc.), company expansion etc.
Disability Resource Center, Arizona State University
Math/Science Conversion Specialist Sept. 2010 – May 2012
 Convert academic material written in scientific English text to Braille for students with vision disabilities
 Helped manage work database, proofread scientific documents, work with Optical Character Recognition software
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EDUCATION
Master of Science in Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Arizona State University Aug. 2010 - May 2012
Significant courses – Digital Communication, Wireless Communication, Wireless Networks, Random Signal Theory, Multidimension Digital Signal Processing, Embedded Systems Programming, Mobile Computing: Systems and Applications
GPA: 3.7/4
Maharashtra Institute of Technology, University of Pune, India
Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics & Telecommunication, June 2006 - July 2010
Significant courses – DSP, Information Theory and Coding Techniques, Analog and Digital Communications, Computer and Voice Networks
ACADEMIC PROJECTS
 Android - Energy-Accuracy Tradeoff using A-Loc Aug. 2011.– Dec. 2011
 The project involved developing an Android application which implemented the ‘ALoc algorithm’ as well as simulated user movements. The ‘Aloc algorithm’ is a mobile-device localization technique which reduces energy consumption by intelligently using modalities such as WiFi or Cell triangulation, rather than GPS.
 Monte Carlo simulations of wireless communication systems in MATLAB v7.x Aug. 2011 – Dec. 2011
 Simulation and performance analyses of different receiver diversity combining schemes viz. Equal Gain Combining, Maximal Ratio Combining, Selection Combining and Post Detection Combining
 Simulation of a CDMA system with BPSK modulation and RAKE receiver. Performance was analyzed for different channel conditions, number of RAKE fingers and number of users in the system
 Evaluating the performance of OFDM for different block inter-leavers, channel conditions and different convolution encoders
 Simulation and evaluation of non-causal MMSE equalizers of different lengths. Analyzed for different ISI channels
 Embedded Systems Programming Jan. 2011– Mar 2011
 Implemented a basic character device driver in Linux. Project involved implementation of data pipe consisting of ring buffers, producer, routing and consumer threads in the kernel space
 Developed a non-blocking device interface for a Wii Nunchuk on I2C port using character device module. Application used QT library for plotting trajectory of the Nunchuk. Same project was also done on Intel Atom platform running VxWorks real-time embedded operating system
 Implementation VxWorks APIs to simulate occupancy of the processor by periodic tasks. The feasibility of the scheduling was analyzed with priorities, periods and number of active tasks as variables
 Computer Architecture Jan. 2011 – Mar. 2011
 Implementation of a ‘Cache simulator’ in C with different parameters viz. cache size, cache associativity, block size, replacement policy and write policy. Tested using a trace file consisting of sequence of ‘reads’ and ‘writes’, final result involved calculation the hit rate for the different configurations
 Segmentation of Tumor in Axial MRI brain scans June 2009- May 2010
 The aim of the project was to perform the segmentation of brain pathology in axial MRI scans of brain using an Artificial Neural Network and K-means clustering algorithm and make an objective evaluation of the obtained results to determine the most suitable method. This project was implemented on MATLAB v7.x using the Image Processing and Neural Network Toolboxes.

3. EXTRA CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
• Self-taught bass player.
• Avid soccer player for the past 12 years, representing college teams and semi-professional league clubs.
AWARDS/HONORS
• Ranked 6th in Pune, INDIA, in the Higher Secondary Certification exam from amongst 100,000 students