The world has come to rely on the Internet – it provides everything from commerce to education to entertainment. While the youngest of us cannot remember a world without it, the Internet grew out of decades of research by a community of dedicated scientists and technologists.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers present their annual Internet Award to individuals who contribute exceptionally to developing Internet technology. Mark Handley, Professor of Networked Systems at UCL’s Department of Computer Science, will receive this award for 2012. This is in recognition of his academic research, his work designing Internet standards, and his development of real-world systems to fill real-world needs.

Multimedia Calling

When the Internet was first dreamt up, making phone calls and watching videos in real time–known as streaming multimedia communications–were not on the menu. The Internet provides “best-effort” delivery of data, potentially reordering or dropping some of the information between sender and receiver. Audio and video applications respond badly to these quirks: reordered or dropped data cause unwanted “glitches” in a call or video. To overcome these limitations, Professor Handley and colleagues developed networked multimedia systems that are resilient to loss and reordering, so that users can enjoy calls and videos carried over the Internet without glitches. In addition, Professor Handley’s work on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) allows voice and video calls to be made over the Internet. SIP is now widely used both for Internet calls and as the basis of call signalling on 3G mobile telephone networks.

Congestion Control

When users try to send too much data over a part of the Internet, they can exceed a link’s capacity, causing congestion. This basic problem will always be with us — while links increase in capacity over time, the population of users grows too, as does the bandwidth demanded by each user. The most widely used congestion control protocol for the Internet is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

But TCP doesn’t work particularly well with audio and video, which require data to arrive with lower delay and at a more predictable rate than TCP can typically achieve. At the same time, it is desirable that a new congestion control protocol compete fairly with “original” TCP: if two users share a congested link, one using TCP, and the other the new protocol, the new protocol should not claim more of the link than TCP does. Professor Handley and his collaborators created TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC), a novel congestion control protocol better suited to the demands of audio and video. As its name suggests, TFRC achieves those aims while competing fairly with TCP.

Distributing Data

In the late 1990s, users began sharing large amounts of data using peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, which were intended to cope with any one server going down. However, the most common designs needed to either keep a central index, recording which files were stored where (itself vulnerable to failure), or blindly ask hosts in the P2P system if they had a particular file  — wasting valuable bandwidth and time. A broad community were working on eliminating these drawbacks from P2P systems, and Mark was a co-creator of one of the three simultaneous seminal proposals for creating a Distributed Hash Table(DHT)  — a way to store files in a P2P system that uses no central index, yet allows requests to be sent quickly to the exact hosts that hold the desired data.

Routing Research

In addition to his many research contributions, Mark has also been a key enabler of others’ networking research. Concerned that closed-source routers meant Internet researchers couldn’t work on real-world problems, in 2000 Mark founded and led a team to create XORP (the eXtensible Open Router Platform), complete open-source software for a router based on standard, easily available PCs. XORP allows researchers to modify routers’ behaviour, and so to investigate new Internet protocol designs that were not previously possible. The Internet research community has made great use of XORP for creating new protocols and measurements to enhance and extend the Internet.

Internet Engineer

Beyond his academic work, Professor Handley has devoted much time to the Internet Engineering Task Force, working to establish his ideas and those of his peers as standards for the global Internet. In receiving this award, he joins the ranks of those who developed the foundations of the Internet – previous winners have been responsible for DNS, networked email and the Internet’s ancestor, the ARPAnet, among other innovations.

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