Van Jacobson

One of the primary contributors to the TCP/IP protocol stack — the technological foundation of today's Internet — Jacobson is renowned for his pioneering achievements in network performance and scaling. He joined PARC as a research fellow in August 2006, and has also served as Chief Scientist for Packet Design in the adjacent Xerox complex. Prior to that, he served as 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 (Jacobson's algorithm) 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 RFC 1144, mainly meant to improve performance over low-speed links, popularly known as Van Jacobson TCP/IP Header Compression. Furthermore, he co-wrote a few widely used network diagnostics tools, such as traceroute, pathchar, and tcpdump.

For his work, Jacobson received the 2001 ACM SIGCOMM Award and the 2003 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006. In January 2006 at Linux.conf.au, he presented another idea about network performance improvement, which was subsequently referred to as network channels. He discussed his ideas on Content-centric networking in August 2006 as part of the Google Tech Talks, and this work has remained the focus of his efforts at PARC.