Some impact of my work beyond research papers
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.