Van Jacobson

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Van Jacobson joined PARC as a research fellow in August 2006 [1]. He previously served as chief scientist at Packet Design LLC[2]. Prior to that, he was chief scientist at Cisco Systems and group leader for the Network Research Group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

Jacobson is best known for his work in IP network performance and scaling; his work redesigning TCP/IP's flow control algorithms to better handle congestion is said to have saved the Internet from collapsing due to traffic in 1988-1989. He is also well-known for the TCP/IP Header Compression protocol described in RFC1144, mainly meant to improve performance over low-speed links, popularly known as Van Jacobson TCP/IP Header Compression. Furthermore he has co-written a few widely used network diagnostics tools, such as traceroute, pathchar and tcpdump.

For his work, Jacobson received the 2001 ACM SIGCOMM Award, the 2003 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006.

In January 2006 at Linux.conf.au, Jacobson presented another idea about network performance improvement - network channels.

Van Jacobson video on Google Tech Talks [3]

His current work at PARC focuses on Content Centric Networking [4]