Princeton Professor to Speak on Internet Architecture

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 23, 2001 — Larry Peterson, professor of computer science at Princeton University, will present a general talk, “Limits of the Internet Architecture,” on Thursday, April 5, at 8 p.m. in the Thompson Chemistry Lab, room 202. He will also present a science colloquium on Friday, April 6, at 2:35 p.m. in the Thompson Chemistry, room 206, titled “Preliminary Experience Implementing an Extensible Router.” Both lectures are free and open to the public. Peterson is this year’s department of computer science Class of 1960’s Speaker.

His research focuses on end-to-end issues related to computer networks, and he has been involved in the design and implementation of x-kernel and Scout operating systems.

In “Limits of the Internet Architecture,” Peterson will discuss how the Internet has adapted while under increasing pressure to provide advanced services and functionality. Since the cornerstone protocols of the Internet architecture, TCP and IP, were designed 20 years ago, the Internet has experienced a six-magnitude increase in link bandwidth and a seven order of magnitude increase in size. The talk will explore the aspects of the architecture that have allowed it to be so adaptable and identify some of the mechanisms that have been designed to accommodate this growth and performance improvements. The talk will conclude by speculating about what limits, if any, the architecture has.

In his second presentation, Peterson will focus on recent efforts to add new services to the Internet which have increased interest in software-based routers that are easy to extend and evolve. At the same time, emerging network processors make it possible to build an IP router that is both extensible and has better performance than commercially available enterprise routers. This talk describes experiences implementing an extensible router, with a particular focus on how we allocate and schedule the router’s resources.

The co-author of a textbook, “Computer Networks: A Systems Approach,” Peterson is also the editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. He has served on the editorial boards for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication, in addition to program committees for SOSP, SIGCOMM, OSDI, and ASPLOS. He is a member of the Internet’s End-to-End research group, and an ACM Fellow.

Peterson received his Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University in 1985. Before joining the Princeton faculty, Peterson was head of the computer science department at the University of Arizona.

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