Van Jacobson is an American computer scientist, renowned for his work on TCP/IP network performance and scaling.2001 SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Achievement to Van Jacobson "for contributions to protocol architecture and congestion control." He is one of the primary contributors to the TCP/IP protocol stack—the technological foundation of today’s Internet."Van Jacobson Biography", IEEE Global History Network, accessed 31 March 2012 Since 2013, Jacobson is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) working on Named Data Networking.
Early life and education Jacobson studied Modern Poetry, Physics, and Mathematics and received an M.S. in physics and a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Arizona."An Analysis of TCP Processing Overhead" (Biography), David D. Clark, et al., IEEE Communications Magazine, June 1989, p. 29 He did graduate work at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.Borsook, Paulina. "Profile: Van Jacobson keeps communications channels open", Network World, March 24, 1994, p. 51
Career His work redesigning TCP/IP's congestion control algorithms (Jacobson's algorithm)"Congestion avoidance and control", Van Jacobson, Proceedings of SIGCOMM ’88, Stanford, CA, Aug. 1988, ACM"Congestion avoidance and control", Van Jacobson, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review - Special twenty-fifth anniversary issue, Highlights from 25 years of the Computer Communication Review, Volume 25 Issue 1, Jan. 1995, pp.157-187 to better handle congestion is said to have saved the Internet from collapsing in the late 1980s and early 1990s."Van Jacobson: 2002 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award Recipient", IEEE web site He is also known for the TCP/IP Header Compression protocol described in RFC 1144: Compressing TCP/IP Headers for Low-Speed Serial Links, popularly known as Van Jacobson TCP/IP Header Compression.
He is the co-author of several widely used network diagnostic tools, including traceroute, tcpdump, and pathchar. He was a leader in the development of the multicast backbone (MBone)""Building the Internet's MBone: LBL's Van Jacobson a Principal Architect" , Jeffery Kahn, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 9 December 1994 and the multimedia tools vic,"vic - Video Conferencing Tool", web page at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory vat,"vat - LBL Audio Conferencing Tool", web page at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and wb."wb - LBNL Whiteboard Tool", web page at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Jacobson worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory from 1974 to 1998 as a Research scientist in the Real-time Controls Group and later group leader for the Network Research Group."LBNL's Network Research Group", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, August 2009 He was Chief Scientist at Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000.Van Jacobson: Past and Current Positions in "TCP/IP pioneer's past is prologue", Loring Wirbel, EE Times, March 7, 2005 In 2000 he became Chief Scientist for Packet Design, Inc. and in 2002 for a spin-off, Precision I/O.Packet Design, website He joined PARC as a research fellow in August 2006.
In January 2006 at Linux.conf.au, Jacobson presented another idea about network performance improvement, which has since been referred to as network channels."Speeding up Networking", Van Jacobson and Bob Felderman, Linux.conf.au 2006, Dunedin, NZ Jacobson discussed his ideas on Named data networking (NDN), the focus of his work at PARC, in August 2006 as part of the Google Tech Talks."Content-centric networking", PARC A Xerox Company"A New Way to look at Networking", Van Jacobson, Google Tech Talk, 30 August 2006, YouTube Video Jacobson is now working with the NDN Consortium funded by the National Science Foundation to explore and create the future of the internet.
Awards and memberships Jacobson together with his colleague at LBL, Steven McCanne, won R&D Magazine's 1995 R&D 100 Award for development of a software toolpack that enables multiparty audio and visual conferencing via the MBone (Multicast Backbone)." Lab's connection to the MBone wins '95 R&D 100 Award", Bruce Davies, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
For his work, Jacobson received the 2001 ACM SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Achievement "for contributions to protocol architecture and congestion control", the 2002 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004 for his "contributions to network protocols, including multicasting and the control of congestion.""Mr. Van Jacobson", Members Directory, National Academy of Engineering
In 2012, Jacobson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.2012 Inductees , Internet Hall of Fame website. Last accessed April 24, 2012
See also Content centric networking
References
External links
Van Jacobson Denies Averting Internet Meltdown in 1980s (Cade Metz, Wired, 2012-05-25)