Paul Francis
As of January 2009, I have joined the Max Plank Institute
in Kaiserslautern, Germany as the Director of the Institute
for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)
I joined the Computer Science department at Cornell in 2003 after many years
in industry labs such as Bellcore, NTT Research Labs
in Tokyo, and ACIRI, and a brief (and poorly
timed) stint with two Silicon Valley
startups. My work over the years has focused on network routing and
addressing problems, with a particular interest in large and self-configuring
systems (starting with Landmark Routing in 1987, extending to ChunkySpread P2P multicast today). While
at Cornell, my ongoing projects included network management and TCP, in
addition to work in BGP routing, IP anycast
deployment, P2P multicast, and NAT/Firewall traversal. Though it
is much harder than it used to be, I remain dedicated to research that is
likely to have impact, and actively pursue technology transfer where possible
(i.e. IETF activity). Past successes include Network Address Translation
(NAT), the idea of shared multicast trees (which form the basis of PIM-SM), and
the use of multiple addresses to scale routing in the face of site multihoming adopted by IPv6.
I'm privileged to have worked with a talented and dedicated group of students
while at Cornell.
More details can be found in my CV, lists of publications and patents, and my research and teaching pages.
