Sally Floyd

Biography

For the past 15 years, Dr. Sally Floyd, senior scientist at the International Computer Science Institute's Center for Internet Research in Berkeley, California, has played an invaluable role in the Internet community. She has contributed to the study and development of active queue management,which allows the transport mechanisms of the Internet to operate smoothly and gracefully handle a phenomenal growth in traffic. The heart of her work has involved identifying practical ways to control and stabilize Internet congestion, a difficult undertaking given the network's vast and ever-increasing scale. Her early activities at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California highlighted some of the surprising dynamics that arise when applying control mechanisms to the distributed elements of a network.

She showed that periodic router communication can lead to inadvertent, large-scale message synchronization. Her elegant solution of adding random jitter to message timers to avoid synchronization is now a standard component of timer-based protocols.