J. Noel Chiappa

Member of the TCP/IP Working Group which started the Internet project, Chiappa was instrumental in developing an early ring-based local area network and gateway. He has worked as an independent researcher in the area of information systems architecture and software, with his principal occupation being involvement in research related to the long-term future of the Internet, including various efforts in the Internet Research Task Force. He has also been involved in the work of the Internet Engineering Task Force (the IETF), the group which creates the technical standards for the Internet. He was born and grew up in Bermuda and attended Saltus Grammar School, Phillips Andover Academy, and M.I.T.

His principal technical activity has been thinking about the basic architecture of a next generation internetwork layer: what service model it would provide, how it would be broken up into functional subsystems, how those functional subsystems would interact, and what the basic outline of the mechanisms involved would be, in terms of what state would reside where in the system, and how it would be maintained. Although his primary research interest has been in the overall structure of the fundamental network-wide basic data service, Chiappa is generally interested in the problems of the packet layer of internetworking — that is, everything involved in getting traffic from one host to another anywhere in the internetwork. He also has interests in the area of routing and addressing architectures for very large scale (globally ubiquitous and larger) internetworks.

His principal activity in these areas has been the LISP project, where he thought about the long-term architectural developmental path and also worked on optimizations. Among other important past activities in these areas with which he has been associated is the Nimrod project, a design for the next generation routing and addressing architecture for the Internet. Chiappa has served as co-chair of the Nimrod Working Group (WG) of the IETF. Other past activities in these areas also included the DARPA-funded NewArch Project and the IRTF Namespace Research Group.

He joined the TCP/IP Working Group — the group which started the Internet project as an ARPA-funded research effort — and its successors, up to the IETF, from 1977 onward. He served as the Area Director for Internet Services of the IETF Steering Group from 1987–1992. Chiappa has been a member of the Research Staff of the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, serving from 1977–1982 and 1984–1986.

While at M.I.T., he worked on packet switching and local area networks, and was responsible for the conception of the multi-protocol backbone and the multi-protocol router. After leaving M.I.T., Chiappa worked with a number of companies, including Proteon, to bring networking products based on work done at M.I.T. to the public. He resides in Yorktown, Virginia, with his family.