Beyond Papers

Some impact of my work beyond research papers

CricInfo

In the past, I was a founding team member of the world's largest sports portal, CricInfo (acquired by ESPN in 2007). I played the role of CTO in the formative years. We wrote our own webserver (pre-apache), had our own little CDN (pre-Akamai) and have been credited as inventing live blogging. Here is an article that I wrote as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations about a night that changed CricInfo.

Bufferbloat

My PhD thesis developed the first stochastic differential equation (fluid) model of TCP that led to formal control theoretic analysis of congestion control mechanisms on the Internet. We ourselves took the model and proposed the PI controller as a way to better control TCP and manage latencies. Many years later, an engineering team at Cisco developed the PIE (PI Enhanced) controller based on our PI controller that is being used to solve the problem of "bufferbloat" (excessive delays on the Internet because of larger than needed buffers). The PIE controller has become a part of the DOCSIS 3.1 standard and will soon be deployed on all cable modems around the world.

Infinio

In Summer of 2011, along with my colleague Dan Rubenstein and PhD student Joshua Reich, I founded another company Infinio (nee Silver Lining) in the area of datacenter storage and networking. The company continues to be the leader in the area of storage acceleration for virtualized data centers.

Network Neutrality

I played an active role in the Net Neutrality regulations process in India, where the citizen's movement adopted my definition of Net Neutrality and the final regulations that were passed by the regulatory authority, TRAI, were consistent with the definition. I also testified in the Indian parliament on the topic. Coverage of that here. The regulations in India have been called the strongest Net Neutrality protections anywhere. While I have written a lot of papers analyzing the economic ecosystem of the Internet, one particular aspect we have been emphasizing is the importance of competition. In 2011, together with my former student Richard Ma, we wrote a paper proposing a Public Option ISP, via a mechanism like Municipal Broadband to address the issue of Network Neutrality. The idea, also proposed by people from the legal/regulatory side like Susan Crawford, has gained a lot of momemtum with even President Obama getting behind it. Some coverage of my views on the topic is here.