Jennifer Rexford

Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor in Engineering and Professor of Computer Science. Leader in computer networking. Contributed to the design and operation of the Internet through research on routing protocols and traffic engineering. While working at AT&T Research, she investigated how the core of the Internet works, and how to make the network more efficient, reliable, and secure. One study that stands out is her work analyzing the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the technology that the thousands of administrative domains comprising the Internet use to learn how to reach each other. She showed that, while the local policies of different domains could lead to unstable global behavior, the economic incentives underlying these policies lead to a stable Internet routing system in practice. She proposed guidelines that network administrators can follow to ensure BGP stability, as well as tools and techniques for delivering Internet traffic efficiently. She introduced a new way to design and manage computer networks, by separating the data plane that forwards traffic from a programmable control plane that computes paths. This approach promises to be the way forward to evolve the Internet for new applications and performance requirements.