Radia Perlman

The main point of this lecture is to encourage critical thinking.  So much of what “everyone knows” about network protocols is, actually false.   For instance, why do we need both Ethernet and IP?  The “obvious” answer is that IP is “layer 3” and Ethernet is “layer 2”, but in fact, once Ethernet stopped being a single wire (layer 2), and something that is forwarded (layer 3’s job) it became a layer  3 protocol.  So the right question is “why do we use to layer 3 protocols?”  The answer is subtle and leads to discussion of how Ethernet became a “layer 3” protocol, and evolution to TRILL and other overlay networks.  There are also buzzwords such as “SDN”, and fads such as “active networks” and “information-centric networking”.  This talk will demystify these, as time follows.

Biography:

Radia Perlman received her PhD in EECS from MIT and is currently a Fellow at EMC.  She has made many contributions to the fields of network routing and security protocols including robust and scalable network routing, spanning tree bridging, storage systems with assured delete, and distributed computation resilient to malicious participants.  She wrote the textbook Interconnections, and co-wrote the textbook Network Security.  She holds over 100 issued patens.  She has received numerous awards including lifetime achievement awards from ACM’s SIGCOMM and Usenix.  She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is inducted into the internet Hall of Fame, and the inventor Hall of Fame.