Van Jacobson

Redesigner of the transmission-control protocol

• Born: 1950

Primary Company/Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Introduction

Although his name lacks the public recognition of many of the giants of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century technology revolution, Van Jacobson played an important role in bringing the World Wide Web to the global public. His work on redesigning the transmission-control protocol (TCP) and expanding its scope was instrumental in providing the means of digital communication that came to be known as the Internet. Jacobson's technology, which involved the development of what is popularly known as Jacobson's algorithms, made it possible for the Internet to continue to expand without collapsing in the late 1980s. His work on networking led him to create diagnostic tools such as traceroute, tcpdump, and pathchar. Jacobson has also been responsible for creating various media technologies used on the Internet, including Mbone. He continued to work to make computer networking and the Internet stabler with projects such as the development of content-centric networking, which improves Internet performance and stability by identifying data and cutting down on redundancy.

Early Life

Van Jacobson first began to make a name for himself while working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as part of the lab's Network Research Group. He remained at that facility for twenty-five years. Part of his responsibilities involved leading the team that developed “multicast backbone” (Mbone) and working on Internet multimedia tools such as Vic, Vat, and wb. While at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Jacobson worked closely with the Computer Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley.

In the early 1990s, Jacobson transferred to the networking giant Cisco Systems, where he served as the chief scientist. Cisco had been founded in 1984 by a married couple, Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner. At Cisco, Jacobson was responsible for working on applications such as quality of service (QoS) and voice services.

Life's Work

The transmission-control protocol (TCP) was invented by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, who subsequently became known as the fathers of the Internet, in 1972–73. The Internet protocol (IP) eventually became familiar to Internet users who learned the purpose of IP addresses. In 1985, what would become the Internet was actually ARPANET, and it was being operated by the U.S. Department of Defense. At the time, Jacobson was teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, one of the research institutions granted access to ARPANET. He became frustrated at the network's slow speeds when he tried to upload class material for his students. He turned that frustration into action and began working on ways to solve the problem.

In 1988, as the Internet began to be more crowded with constantly increasing traffic, it faced potential collapse. That year, Jacobson presented a paper on congestion avoidance and control, which had a major impact on the industry. His TCP/IP flow-control algorithms redesigned the original TCP, expanding the scope of the work of Cerf and Kahn and allowing the Internet to avoid collapse. By 2012, some 90 percent of Internet service providers had become dependent on Jacobson's redesigned TCP for operating their networks. Professionals employed in Internet research and development also continue to use diagnostic tools developed by Jacobson. Furthermore, his work on multimedia applications has become the standard for work done by other developers.

In 1999, an additional problem with the Internet surfaced as new technologies were developed for streaming media. Traditionally, data being sent over the Internet reacted to increased traffic by slowing its own speed, but computers streaming data continued to demand right of way, decreasing transmission speed only slightly. The result was that data transmission for other Internet users became slower as streaming demands increased. As cable modems and the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), through telephone lines, replaced the dial-up modems of the past, streaming had the potential to create Internet gridlock. Jacobson responded to this problem by insisting that incentives for regulating Internet traffic needed to be put in place before streaming media became the road hog of the Internet.

In 2002, Jacobson helped found Packet Design. The company had been the brainchild of technology entrepreneurs Judy Estrin, who had been the chief technology officer at Cisco Systems, and her husband, Bill Carrico, a computer scientist. Initial backing for Packet Design, which focuses on improving the reliability, efficiency, and predictability of IP networks, came from James Barksdale, the former chief executive officer (CEO) of Netscape, and Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems. Packet Design ultimately raised $44 million from sources that included Advanced Technologies, Allegis Capital, Juniper Networks, Masthead Venture Partners, and the Mayfield Fund. As the chief scientist at Packet Design, Jacobson worked with a number of former Cisco colleagues on solving problems brought on by the growth of the Internet. With additional backing from a number of Menlo Park companies, including Advanced Technology Ventures, 3i, and Foundation Capital, Packet Design spun off Precision I/O in March 2003 for the purpose of improving Ethernet technologies, which provide the basis for communication among networks connecting to the Internet. In addition to cofounding Precision I/O, Jacobson served as its chief scientific officer.

Jacobson has also made contributions to computer networking by his work on improving performance through the use of network channels. In 2006, he was designated as a research fellow at PARC, formerly the Palo Alto Research Center, a division of Xerox. At PARC, Jacobson assumed responsibility for leading research in the area of content-centric networking. The same year he joined PARC, he presented “A New Way to Look at Networking,” which Google Tech Talk made available throughout the Internet. It reportedly created a storm among those involved in network research and development.

In 2012, Jacobson introduced the concept of content-centric networking in the January issue of the Communications of the ACM. He suggests in the article that performance, salability, and security could all be improved by replacing the present practice of retrieving chunks of information with his method of retrieving information over the Internet according to content. He and his team are attempting to change the way the public understands the ways in which computer networks operate.

Jacobson insists that one of the major problems on the Internet is redundancy. As an example, he cites an event that occurred during NBC's broadcasting of the 2006 Winter Olympics. When skier Bode Miller was disqualified from an Alpine event, some five thousand identical videos of the event were uploaded to NBC's server, which was incapable of recognizing the redundancy. With Jacobson's content-centric networking, a router is granted the capability of rooting out redundancy by allowing the data rather, than the server, to function as the point of identification in the communication process between Internet users and their data sources.

Jacobson began teaching computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, around 2013.

Personal Life

In 2001, ACM's Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) honored Jacobson's contributions to the industry with a Lifetime Achievement Award, recognizing his work on “protocol architecture and congestion control.” Two years later, Jacobson received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communication Award in recognition of his contributions toward solving the problems with congestion on the Internet. In 2004, Jacobson was named to the National Academy of Engineering. In 2012, Jacobson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame (along with Cerf), paying homage to his contributions to the development of networking performance and scaling.

Bibliography

“Buffer Blast: What's Wrong with the Internet?” Communications of the ACM 55.2 (2012): n. pag. Print.

“Extreme Peer-to-Peer.” PC Magazine 26.14 (2007): n. pag. Print.

Hafner, Katie. “The M Bone: Can't You Hear It Knocking?” Newsweek 124.23 (1994): n. pag. Print.

Jacobson, Van, et al. “Networking Named Content.” Communications of the ACM 55.1 (2012): n. pag. Print.

King, Cecilia. “Former Executives from Top Tech Firms Launch Fourth Networking Start-Up.” San Jose Mercury News 13 June 2000: n. pag. Print.

Robinson, Sara. “Multimedia Transmissions Are Driving Internet toward Gridlock.” New York Times 23 Aug. 1999. Print.