Van Jacobson is an American computer scientist who is well-known for his work on improving the speed and efficiency of the Internet. He played a major role in creating the TCP/IP protocol stack, which is the set of rules that allows computers to communicate online. Since 2013, Jacobson has been an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he focuses on research related to Named Data Networking.

Early life and education

Jacobson studied Modern Poetry, Physics, and Mathematics. He earned a Master of Science in physics and a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the University of Arizona. He completed graduate work at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

Career

Van Jacobson's work to improve how the internet manages traffic, called congestion control, helped prevent the internet from becoming too slow or failing during the late 1980s and early 1990s. He also created a method to make data move faster over slow internet connections, described in a document called RFC 1144. This method is often called Van Jacobson TCP/IP Header Compression.

He helped develop several tools used to check and fix problems in internet networks, including traceroute, tcpdump, and pathchar. He was an important leader in creating a system called the multicast backbone (MBone) and tools for sending video and audio over the internet, such as vic, vat, and wb.

From 1974 to 1998, Jacobson worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory as a scientist in the Real-time Controls Group and later led the Network Research Group. He was Chief Scientist at Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000. In 2000, he became Chief Scientist at Packet Design, Inc., and in 2002, he joined a company called Precision I/O. In August 2006, he became a research fellow at PARC.

In January 2006, Jacobson shared an idea about improving internet speed at a conference called Linux.conf.au. This idea became known as network channels. Later that year, in August 2006, he talked about a new way to design the internet, called Named Data Networking (NDN), during a presentation at Google. Today, Jacobson works with the NDN Consortium, which is supported by the National Science Foundation, to help shape the future of the internet.

Awards and memberships

In 1995, Jacobson and his colleague at LBL, Steven McCanne, received R&D Magazine's R&D 100 Award for creating a software package that allows multiple people to have video and audio meetings using the MBone (Multicast Backbone).

Jacobson was honored with the 2001 ACM SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Achievement for his work on designing network protocols and managing traffic flow. He also received the 2002 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award. In 2004, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to network protocols, including multicasting and managing traffic flow.

In 2012, Jacobson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.