Academic Work
Graduate and undergraduate research in applied physics, systems engineering, and network architecture — forming the analytical foundation I bring to production infrastructure work.
This research examined electromagnetic wave propagation characteristics in mixed urban environments, with particular focus on the factors affecting wireless signal attenuation, reflection, and multipath interference at frequencies relevant to emerging broadband wireless access systems. The study combined theoretical analysis with empirical field measurements to develop a practical propagation model applicable to real-world network planning.
The study was motivated by the rapid expansion of wireless internet access in the Kyiv metropolitan area during the early 2000s — a period when wireless ISPs were deploying infrastructure with limited guidance from standardized propagation models designed for local conditions.
Measurements were collected across multiple urban microcell environments, capturing signal level variance as a function of distance, building density, and environmental conditions. The research applied Friis transmission equations and empirically derived path loss exponents to develop a simplified prediction model tuned to the physical geometry of Eastern European urban construction.
Figure 1: Wireless propagation measurement grid — urban signal attenuation vs. distance across mixed building-density environments
The analytical framework developed in this research — decomposing complex real-world behavior into measurable, modelable components — remains central to how I approach infrastructure engineering problems. Whether diagnosing unexplained packet loss, designing overlay network segmentation, or investigating cloud connectivity failures, the instinct to find the physical or logical root cause before tuning symptoms comes directly from this formative work in applied physics.
This capstone project addressed the architectural and operational challenges of enterprise network design in environments where workloads span on-premises data centers, public cloud (AWS), and private cloud (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure). The research produced a reference architecture for hybrid cloud network connectivity prioritizing security, observability, and operational resilience — validated against realistic enterprise constraints including budget, staffing, and vendor compatibility.
The central finding is that most enterprise hybrid cloud networking failures are not technical failures — they are observability failures. Organizations cannot diagnose what they cannot see, and most hybrid network architectures create fundamental visibility gaps that accumulate into operational debt.
Enterprise organizations increasingly operate workloads across multiple cloud providers and on-premises environments, but network architecture decisions are frequently made independently per environment rather than holistically. The result is fragmented connectivity, inconsistent security policy enforcement, and — critically — insufficient observability across the full traffic path.
This project examined how a mid-enterprise organization (1,500–3,000 users, 200–600 cloud workloads) should design hybrid network connectivity from first principles, with security and observability as first-class design requirements rather than post-deployment additions.
Figure 1: Reference architecture — hybrid AWS/OCI network connectivity with centralized observability plane
The proposed architecture organizes hybrid cloud networking into four functional planes:
Figure 2: Traffic flow matrix — on-premises to AWS, on-premises to OCI, and AWS-to-OCI paths with security control insertion points
The most valuable outcome of this research was clarifying the relationship between architecture decisions and operational outcomes. Architectural choices that appear equivalent at design time often diverge significantly in operational practice — particularly around troubleshooting latency and incident response capability.
The research also reinforced that hybrid cloud networking is fundamentally a distributed systems problem, not a networking-in-isolation problem. The failure modes that matter most — cascading failures, split-brain conditions, asymmetric routing — require cross-domain visibility that most organizations have not invested in building.
Finally, the capstone process itself demonstrated the value of academic rigor for engineering practice: forcing structured literature review, explicit methodology, and documented assumptions surfaced gaps in my own operational mental models that I have since addressed in production environments.