Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, March 15, 2004 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Lawrence Roberts

"The Past and Future of the Internet"

ABSTRACT -- For the last 35 years routers have not changed, they still support only "best effort" traffic. However, the bandwidth available to people has been increasing rapidly with the advent of broadband and wideband access. The result is that many new services like voice and video are now desired that require far better QoS (Quality of Service) than "best effort" IP can support. Also, TCP was designed for low-speed access and today TCP moves data blocks like web pages orders of magnitude slower than would be possible with rate feedback from the network. From our ATM experience we know these improvements are possible, but were not incorporated into IP. Two new innovations will change this. First, flow routing permits IP to support all the ATM QoS features like guaranteed rate and delay with lower cost and higher reliability. Second, new additions to IPv6 now in the standards track will permit users to signal at line rate their requirement for guaranteed rates, get rate feedback for TCP to allow it to jump quickly to gigabit flow rates over any delay, and add priorities for delay and preemption. These QoS features along with IPv6's virus and spam protecting security and full terminal mobility will make IPv6 a compelling alternative in the near future.

SPEAKER -- Lawrence G. Roberts is currently Founder, Vice Chairman and CTO of Caspian Networks. At Caspian Networks he has designed and built an IP Flow Router, a new QoS capable type of Internet router. Dr. Roberts has been instrumental in the development of both 3-D graphics and packet data communications since the early 1960's. His pioneering work on computer communications resulted in the Internet and his subsequent networking innovations permit the integration of voice and video into the Internet.    Dr. Roberts has BS, MS, and Ph.D. Degrees from MIT and was responsible for the design, initiation, planning and development of ARPANET, the world's first major packet network, the predecessor to Internet, while the Director of Information Processing Techniques for DARPA. After developing packet switching, Dr. Roberts founded the world's first packet data communications carrier, Telenet, which was sold to GTE in 1979 and subsequently became the data division of Sprint. In 1982, Dr. Roberts became CEO of DHL Corporation, from 1983 to 1993, Dr. Roberts was CEO of NetExpress, and from 1993-1998 CEO of ATM Systems.    Dr. Roberts has received numerous awards for his work, including the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the Harry Goode Memorial Award from the American Federation of Information Processing, the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award, the Interface Conference Award, in 1982, the L.M. Ericsson prize for research in data communications, in 1992 the IEEE Computer Society’s most prestigious award in the communications field, the W. Wallace McDowell Award, in 1998 the ACM SIGCOMM Award for lifetime achievement in communications, in 2000 IEEE 2000 Internet Award, in 2001 the NAE Draper award, and in 2002 the Principe de Asturias Award.