Mark Handley

Biography

Mark Handley’s contributions to Internet engineering have paved the way for real-time multimedia, Internet telephony, and multicast TV. He co-authored today’s standard protocols for multimedia signaling, including the Session Initiation Protocol (for IP telephony and most 3G cellular networks). His contributions helped overcome the limitations of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) congestion control. He collaborated on TCP-Friendly Rate Control for handling Internet streaming and telephony and on XCP explicit congestion control, a fundamentally new approach to congestion control. In 2001, Dr. Handley and his colleagues devised the first Distributed Hash Table (DHT) algorithm; today DHTs are widely used for indexing data in very large distributed systems. Dr. Handley founded the XORP project in 2000 to provide a complete open-source router implementation allowing researchers to experiment with new protocols on real networks. He has also created many open standards as part of the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Dr. Handley is currently professor of networked systems at University College London.