About the talk:
 

Back In 1969 when I designed and managed the construction of the ARPANET, later to be called the Internet, the packet switching design was strongly constrained by the cost of memory such that best-effort service was the best that was possible. Now, 39 years later, the Internet switching equipment continues with the same design leading to a basic limitation in achieving quality video transmission over IP networks and a lack of fairness for data flows which hurts transaction activities in the face of bulk traffic. Until recently, the only solution to congestion in a packet network is to delay and discard packets, a serious problem for both video streaming and data fairness. Many attempts have been made to patch this problem using over-capacity, non-scalable central control and separate networks for video, voice and data but the problem persists. However, recent improvement in flow technology which maintains information for each active flow, insures quality voice/video, allows utilization in the 95% region, and maintains unprecedented fairness. The presentation will describe this technology, a new standard in flow signaling, and the future research requirements.

 

About the speaker:
 

Dr. Roberts is currently Founder, Chairman and Chief Architect of Anagran Inc. He designed and managed the first packet network, the ARPANET (now the Internet). In 1967, Dr. Roberts became the Chief Scientist of ARPA taking on the task of designing, funding, and managing a radically new communications network concept (packet switching) to interconnect computers worldwide. In 1999 he founded Caspian Networks as CTO and designed the first IP flow state device. In 2004 he left Caspian and founded Anagran to build a much less expensive and more capable IP flow manager. Dr. Roberts has BS, MS, and Ph.D. Degrees from MIT and has received numerous awards for his work, including the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the L.M. Ericsson prize for research in data communications, in 1992 the W. Wallace McDowell Award, in 1998 the ACM SIGCOMM Award, and in 2000 the IEEE Internet Award.