The Internet is broken. I should know: I designed it. In 1967, I wrote the first plan for the ancestor of today’s Internet, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, and then led the team that designed and built it. The main idea was to share the available network infrastructure by sending data as small, independent packets, which, though they might arrive at different times, would still generally make it to their destinations. The small computers that directed the data traffic—I called them Interface Message Processors, or IMPs—evolved into today’s routers, and for a long time they’ve kept up with the Net’s phenomenal growth. Until now.
Our current research interests are web page cacheability, distributed proxy servers, cluster-based web servers, internet QoS, router and web switch design, Layer 5 Switch, and web server benchmark designs using trace and execution simulation of RSIM and Simplescalar.