Kevin Fall's Page

3871 Piedmont Ave. #8
Oakland, CA 94611
USA

ACM and IEEE Fellow

Kevin Fall, PhD. served as the founding CEO of Nefeli Networks, a VC-funded company working on management and orchestration of NFV.

Prior to that, he was the Deputy Director and Chief Technology Officer of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

He is also author of TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1 Second Edition.

His LinkedIn profile is Here.

Prior to SEI, he was a Principal Engineer with Qualcomm, and before that he was a Principal Engineer (research) at Intel Corporation in the city of Berkeley, CA., which closed down in 2011.

In 1997, he was co-founder of Netboost Corporation, which developed hardware and software for arbitrary processing of network packets (ultimately used for building intrusion detection systems and other devices). Netboost was acquired by Intel in 1999.

Activities

Ongoing projects and memberships:

• Member of the Civil Air Patrol (188th Squadron)
• Consultant to the Naval Research Advisory Committee (NRAC)

Past projects and memberships:

• Former Co-chair of the Delay Tolerant Networking Research Group
• Steering committee chair for the Challenged Networks Workshop (CHANTS)
• Steering committee member for the ACM/IEEE Workshop on Underwater Networking
• Former member of the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board
• Former advisor to the N4C project in Europe
• Former Member of DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) networks study group
• Track co-chair (w/ Bob Metcalfe) for Networks and Computing Systems at Singularity University
• Arctic correspondent for the Ice Stories project at the San Francisco Exploratorium museum
• Former member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB)(2006-2008)
• Former member of the Defense Science Study Group (2006-2007)
• (NSF) Networking and Communication Technology for developing regions of the world (click here)
• Visiting Scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Conference/Workshop/Journal Committees:

• SIGCOMM 2012, Aug, 2012, PC

• Re-Arch 2010, Nov, 2010, PC
• ANCS, Oct, 2010, PC
• ExtremeCom, Sep, 2010, PC
• Usenix ATC, June, 2010, PC

• Re-Arch 2009, Dec, 2009, PC
• HotNets-VIII 2009, Oct, 2009, PC
• IEEE/ACM Intl Conf on Information and Communication Technologies and Development 2009, Apr, 2009, PC

• ACM Re-Arch08 -- Re-Architecting the Internet, Dec, 2008, PC
• ACM/IEEE WUWNET 2008, Sep, 2008, PC
• IEEE JSAC (special DTN issue), Vol 6, No 5, Jun, 2008, Co-editor

• IEEE/ACM Intl Conf on Information and Communication Technologies and Development 2007, Dec, 2007, PC
• IEEE/ACM ANCS 2007, Dec, 2007, PC
• ACM Co-Next 2007, Dec, 2007, PC
• WUWNET 2007, Sep, 2007, PC
• CHANTS 2007, Sep, 2007, PC
• SIGCOMM 2007, Aug, 2007, PC

• Mobicom 2006, Sep, 2006, demo co-chair
• IEEE/ACM Intl Conf on Information and Communication Technologies and Development 2006, Dec, 2006, PC
• WUWNet 2006, Sep, 2006, TPC co-chair
• Workshop on Challenged Networks (CHANTS-06), at SIGCOMM 2006, Sep, 2006, PC
• Infocom 2006 Apr 23-29, 2006, Barcelona, Spain, PC

• Workshop on Delay Tolerant Tetworking and related topics (WDTN-05), at SIGCOMM 2005, Aug, 2005, TPC co-chair
• W-WIND: Workshop on Experimental Approaches to Wireless Network Design and Analysis, at SIGCOMM 2005, Aug, 2005, PC
• Infocom 2005 Mar 13-17, 2005, Miami, Florida, TPC

• EMNets-1 (1st IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors) Nov 16-18, 2004, Tampa, Florida, PC (link broken)
• Future Directions in Network Architecture at SIGCOMM 2004, Aug 29-Sep 5, 2004, Portland, Oregon, TPC co-chair

Teaching

Although not teaching currently, in 2002 he taught EE122 (the Berkeley undergraduate Communications Networks class) with Professor Jean Walrand.
He also taught this class in 1999.

Way back in Spring '96 he taught the graduate computer networking class, CS268, with Dr. Mike Luby, who was the leader of the Qualcomm group in Berkeley.

Since 1993 he has also taught classes on introductory computer networking for the UCSD, UCB, and UCSC Extension. (This was discontinued about 2001).

Before all of the above, he was a posdoc at MIT and UCSD (simultaneously) in 1995, and a consultant to SDSC and CCR-L.

Employment and Education

Founding CEO for Nefeli Networks, 8/2016 to 7/2018.

Deputy Director (for research) and CTO of SEI, 1/2013 to 8/2016.

Principal Engineer at Qualcomm Corporation until late 2012.

Principal Engineer at Intel Labs, Berkeley (formerly called Intel Research Berkeley and Future Technologies Research Berkeley).
He started as the first full-time staff member there back in 2001.

Kevin received a BA in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1988. While an undergraduate at Berkeley, he worked on several projects including VorTeX (some dynamic extensions to TeX with Prof. Michael Harrison), the DASH operating system (an early objected-oriented operating system for symmetric multiprocessors with David P. Anderson [now running the BOINC and Seti@Home projects]), and later for the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) (the developers of Berkeley UNIX, with Kirk McKusick and Mike Karels.

After graduating from Berkeley, he went to Project Athena (MIT) during the summer of 1989 before beginning graduate school at UCSD. He completed an MS degree in computer science at UCSD in 1991, followed by the PhD in 1994. His dissertation was in the general area of operating systems, with a focus on designing I/O subsystems for I/O intensive applications. His advisor was Professor Joseph Pasquale.

After graduate school, Kevin was a postdoctoral scholar for both UCSD (Joe Pasquale, now at UCSD) and MIT (David Tennenhouse, now at VMWARE). After that, he returned to Berkeley to work at the Network Research Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A couple of years later he helped to start NetBoost Corp, and became and adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley. Eventually, he became a full-time employee of Intel corporation upon its acquisition of NetBoost in late 1999.

Publications

• Books
  • K. Fall, W. R. Stevens, TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1 Second Edition, Pearson, Nov. 2011
• Papers (2005 and later)
  • P. Maniatis et al, " Do You Know Where Your Data Are? Secure Data Capsules for Deployable Data Protection., " HotOS 2011
  • A. Singla et al, " Scalable Routing on Flat Names, " Co-Next 2010
  • M. Maneshet al, " Evaluating the Suitability of Server Network Cards for Software Routers, " ACM SIGCOMM Presto Workshop, Nov 2010
  • K. Fall et al, " A Disruption-Tolerant Architecture for Secure and Efficient Disaster Response communications, " Proc. ISCRAM, May 2010
  • K. Fall et al, " Routing Tables: Is Smaller Really Much Better?, " Hotnets 2009
  • M. Dobrescu et al, " RouteBricks: Exploiting Parallelism to Scale Software Routers ", SOSP 2009, (best paper award)
  • M. Demmer, K. Fall, " The Design and Implementation of a Session Layer for Delay Tolerant Networks ," Elsevier Computer Communications, Feb 2009
  • K. Argyraki et al, " Can Software Routers Scale? ," ACM SIGCOMM Presto Workshop, Aug 2008
  • K. Fall, S. Farrell, " DTN: An Architectural Retrospective ," IEEE JSAC issue on DTN, V26N5, Jun 2008
  • M. Demmer, K. Fall " DTLSR: Delay Tolerant Routing for Developing Regions ," Proc. SIGCOMM NSDR Workshop, Sep 2007
  • D. Meyer, L. Zhang, K. Fall (eds) " Report from the IAB Workshop on Routing and Addressing ," Internet RFC 4984, Sep 2007
  • V. Cerf et. al. " Delay Tolerant Networking Architecture ," Internet RFC 4838, Apr 2007
  • D. Krioukov, K. Fall, kc Claffy, A. Brady, " On Compact Routing for the Internet ," ACM Computer Communications Review, July 2007
  • M. Seligman, K. Fall, P. Mundur ", Alternative Custodians for Congestion Control in Delay Tolerant Networks ," ACM SIGCOMM CHANTS Workshop, Sep 2006
  • P. Mahadevan, D. Krioukov, K. Fall, A. Vahdat " Systematic Topology Analysis and Generation Using Degree Correlations ," ACM SIGCOMM, Sep 2006
  • J. Curcio, P. McGillivary, K. Fall, A. Maffei, K. Schwehr, R. Twiggs, C. Kitts, P. Ballou " Self-Positioning Smart Buoys-- the 'Un-Buoy' Solution: Logistic Considerations using Autonomous Surface Craft Technology and Improved Communications Infrastructure ," MTS/IEEE Oceans Conference, Sep 2006
  • A. Maffei, K. Fall, D. Chayes, " Ocean Instrument Internet: Using Disruption Tolerant Networking to Join Heterogeneous Oceanographic Instrumentation into a Single Network [abstract] ," AGU Ocean Sciences Conference, Feb 2006
  • D. Chayes, S. Roberts, V. Schmidt, E. Gold, R. Arko, A. Johnson, K. Fall, D. Hassilev, " Real-Time Data System and Displays on the USCGC Healy [abstract] ," AGU Ocean Sciences Conference, Feb 2006
  • S. Jain, M. Demmer, R. Patra, K. Fall, " Using redundancy to cope with failures in a Delay Tolerant Network ," ACM SIGCOMM, Aug/Sep 2005
  • Y. Wang, S. Jain, M. Martonosi, K. Fall, " Erasure Coding Based Routing for Opportunistic Networks ," ACM SIGCOMM WDTN Workshop, Aug/Sep 2005
  • E. Brewer, M. Demmer, B. Du, M. Ho, M. Kam, S. Nedevschi, J. Pal, R. Patra, S. Surana, K. Fall," The Case for Technology in Developing Regions ," IEEE Computer, June 2005
  • K. Fall, S. Mccanne," You Don't Know Jack about Network Performance ," ACM Queue Magazine, May 2005
• Papers (2000-2004)
  • K. Fall, " Messaging in Difficult Environments ," Intel Research Berkeley, IRB-TR-04-019, Dec. 27, 2004, presented to the IETF/IAB Workshop on Messaging, Oct 2004
  • M. Demmer, E. Brewer, K. Fall, S. Jain, M. Ho, R. Patra, " Implementing Delay Tolerant Networking ," IRB-TR-04-020, Dec. 28, 2004
  • Melissa Ho and Kevin Fall. " Poster: Delay Tolerant Networking for Sensor Networks. " In the First IEEE Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON 2004) (invited). October 2004 [mini-paper (3 pages)] [poster]
  • S. Jain, K. Fall, R. Patra, " Routing in a Delay Tolerant Network ", SIGCOMM, Aug/Sep 2004
  • D. Krioukov, K. Fall, X. Yang, "Compact Routing on Internet-Like Graphs'', Proc. INFOCOM 2004, Mar. 2004
  • K. Fall, "A Delay Tolerant Networking Architecture for Challenged Internets'', Proc. SIGCOMM 2003, Aug. 2003 Winner of SIGCOMM 2013 Test of Time Paper Award
  • K. Fall, W. Hong, S. Madden, "Custody Transfer for Reliable Delivery in Delay Tolerant Networks", IRB-TR-03-030, July 2003
  • S. Burleigh, K. Fall, V. Cerf, R. Durst, K. Scott, H. Weiss, L. Torgerson, A. Hooke, "Delay-Tolernat Networking: An Approach to Interplanetary Internet'', IEEE Communications Magazine, June 2003
  • E. Blanton, M. Allman, K. Fall, L. Wang, "A Conservative Selective Acknowledgment (SACK)-based Loss Recovery Algorithm for TCP'', Internet RFC 3517, Apr 2003
  • L. Breslau, D. Estrin, K. Fall, S. Floyd, J. Heidemann, A. Helmy, P. Huang, S. McCanne, K. Varadhan, Y. Xu, H. Yu, Advances in Network Simulation (the USC TR Version of the paper) , IEEE Computer 33(5), May 2000
• Papers (prior to 2000)
  • Fall, K., ``Network Emulation in the Vint/NS Simulator'', , Proceedings IEEE ISCC99, Jul 1999
  • Floyd, S., and Fall, K., Promoting the Use of End-to-End Congestion Control , Transactions on Networking, Aug 99 (Winner of the IEEE Comm Society William R. Bennett Prize Paper Award for 1999)
  • S. Floyd, K. Fall, K. Tieu, Estimating Arrival Rates from the RED Packet Drop History , Unpublished, Apr 1998
  • Fall, K., and Floyd, S., Simulation-based Comparisons of Tahoe, Reno, and SACK TCP , Computer Communications Review, 26(3), July 1996
  • Pasquale, J. et al., High-Performance I/O and Networking Software in Sequoia 2000, Digital Technical Journal, 7(3), Dec 1995 (click here for more info)
  • Fall, K., A Peer-to-Peer I/O System in Support of I/O Intensive Workloads , UCSD PhD Thesis, Dec 1994 (compressed Postscript) (PDF). You can also get a copy of the sources used in the related papers (gzip'd tar file).
  • Fall, K., and McCanne, S., and Pasquale, J., Workstation Video Playback Performance with Competitive Process Load, NOSSDAV 1995 Short Paper
  • Chinoy, B., and Fall, K., TCP/IP and HIPPI Performance in the CASA Gigabit Testbed Proc Usenix High-Speed Networking, 1994
  • Fall, K., and Pasquale, J., Improving Continuous-Media Playback Performance with In-Kernel Data Paths , IEEE Intl Conf on Multimedia Comput Sys, 1994
  • Fall, K., and Pasquale, J., Exploiting In-Kernel Data Paths to Improve I/O Throughput and CPU Availability , Proc. Usenix Winter 1993
  • Mercurio, P., et. al., The Distributed Laboratory: An Interactive Visualization Environment for Electron Microscopy and 3D Imaging , Communications of the ACM, 35(6), June 1992
  • K. McKusick, et. al., Beyond 4.3BSD , Proc European Unix Users Group, Feb. 1989

Slides from Talks

• Networked Robot Swarms: Ready or Not?
  Keynote Talk at PerCom 2019, 12-MAR-2019, [PDF]
• Adapting to Change: Routing in a future Internet
  Keynote Talk at MAKI Scientific Workshop, 8-MAR-2019, [PDF]
• Networking the Many, Tiny and Far Away
  Keynote Talk at IEEE ICCCN 2018, 30-JUL-2018, [PDF]
• Comparing Information Centric and Delay Tolerant Networking
  Keynote Talk at IEEE LCN 2012, 23-OCT-2012, [PDF]
• Observations regarding a new (Internet) architecture
  Talk at MSR Cambridge, 18-SEP-2006, [PDF]
• Delay-Tolerant Networking in Maritime Networks
  Invited/Keynote talk at SIGCOMM CHANTS Workshop, 15-SEP-2006, [PDF]
• Networking in a Heterogeneous, Intermittent World
  Invited/Keynote talk at IEEE WOWMOM 2006, 28-JUN-2006, [PDF]
• Delay Tolerant Networking: Architecture and Applications
  Invited Talk at UC Riverside, 23-NOV-2004, [PDF]
• Delay Tolerant Networking: Architecture and Applications
  Invited Talk at Princeton, 9-NOV-2004, [PDF]
• On the Development of Research Practice (except from talk)
  Invited Talk at NPS Monterey, 27-OCT-2004, [PDF]
• Delay Tolerant Networking: Issues and Recent Results
• Invited Talk at IEEE CCW, 19-OCT-2004, [PDF]
• Routing in a Delay Tolerant Network slides presented at ICIR/ICSI, 12-MAY-2004, [PDF]
• Delay-Tolerant Networking for Challenged Internets slides presented at Sprint/ATL, 20-APR-2004, [PDF]
• Compact Routing on Internet-Like Graphs slides presented at INFOCOM 2004, 9-MAR-2004, [PDF]
• Delay-Tolerant Networking: Architecture and Applications slides presented at the Stanford Networking Seminar, 4-DEC-03 [PDF]
• Delay-Tolerant Networking for Developing Regions slides presented to NSF during their site visit of the ICT4B/TIER project 2-DEC-03 [PDF] (similar/reduced set of slides as above talk)
• A Delay-Tolerant Network Architecture for Challenged Internets slides from my presentation at SIGCOMM 2003, April 26 2003 [PDF]
• Delay-Tolerant Networking for Challenged Internets [somewhat updated] slides from my presentation to Mike Luby's Networking class at UC Berkeley, April 25 2003 [PDF]
• Delay Tolerant Networking Research Group - IETf Update slides from my presentation to IETF, Mar 2003 [PDF]
• Delay-Tolerant Networking for Challenged Internets slides from my presentation to ICIR (formerly ACIRI), Jun 2002 [PDF]
• Delay-Tolerant Networking for Extreme Environments slides from my presentation to UCSD, Nov 2001 [PDF]
• Thoughts on the Current IPN Architecture Proposal slides from my presentation to JPL, Oct 2001 [PDF]
• Promoting End-to-End Congestion Control in the Internet slides from my presentation to the UC Berkeley Multimedia Seminar, Apr 1998 [PowerPoint], [PDF]
• Simulating the Internet: challenges and methods slides from my presentation to the IX Computer Science Symposium, Mayab University, Yucatan, Mexico, Apr 1998 [PowerPoint]
• The New NS-2 Emulation Facility, slides from my presentation to the IETF TCP-IMPL Working Group, Apr 1998 [PowerPoint], [PDF],
• NS2 (and possible uses for mobile routing simulation), slides from my presentation to the IETF MANET Working Group, Dec 1997 [PowerPoint]
• Dynamic Load Adaptation in Internet Applications, slides from my DIMACS presentation, Nov 1996 [html]

Ships I have been on

• USCGC Healy (June 2005)
• CFAV Quest (May 2006)

Previous Affiliations

• LBL's Network Research Group
• UCSD Systems and Networking Group
• MIT/LCS Telemedia, Networks and Systems
• SDSC's Applied Network Research Group
• Center for Communications Research (IDA)

Patents

Some other pages of mine (a bit dated):

• CS 268 Home Page (from 1996)
• EECS 122 Home Page (from Fall 2002)
• EECS 122 Home Page (from 1999)

Other people on the web that share my name:

• Kevin A Fall
• Kevin L Fall
• Kevin P Fall

Some other pages of possible interest :

• IEEE's Communications Society
• IEEE's Oceanic Engineering Society
• ACM's SIG on Data Communications (SIGCOMM)
• Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
• Marine Physics Laboratory at Scripps Institute of Oceanography
• Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)
• Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University (LDEO)
• Mystic Aquarium
• Office of Naval Research
• DARPA
• NOAA
• Interactive Oceans (Main page at Univ of Washington)
• GPS information from the FAA
• US Coast Guard
• US Government Mega Site
• National Assoc for Amateur Radio (ARRL)
• AirNav Aviation Information
• Berkeley Marina and Waterfront Information
• Berkeley Marina (City Page)

Older projects:

• The VINT Project (a project in network simulation, in collaboration with Xerox PARC, USC/ISI, and LBNL)
• The (newer) UCB/LBNL Network Simulator (ns-2)
• The (very old) LBNL Network Simulator (ns)

Re-structured using XML 4 Aug 2004. Migrated to new hosting site 4 Jan 2012.
Updated 11-Jul-2007, 3-Feb-2008, 7-Dec-2008, 3-Jul-2009, 27-Sep-2010, 27-Feb-2011, 5-Jan-2012, 9-Oct-2013.
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