Mr. J. Noel Chiappa

An independent researcher working in the area of information systems architecture and software, his current principal occupation is involvement in research related to the long-term future of the Internet, including various efforts in the Internet Research Task Force. He is also involved in the work of the Internet Engineering Task Force (the IETF), the group which creates the technical standards for the Internet. He was born and grew up in Bermuda and attended Saltus Grammar School, Phillips Andover Academy, and M.I.T. His current principal technical activity is thinking about the basic architecture of a next generation internetwork layer: what service model it would provide, how would it be broken up into functional subsystems, how would those functional subsystems interact, and what would be the basic outline of the mechanisms involved, in terms of what state would reside where in the system, and how it would be maintained. Although his primary current research interest is in the overall structure of the fundamental network-wide basic data service, he is generally interested in the problems of the packet layer of internetworking; i.e. everything involved in getting traffic from one host to another anywhere in the internetwork. He also has interests in the area of routing and addressing architectures for very large scale (globally ubiquitous and larger) internetworks. His principal current activity in these areas is the LISP project, where he is thinking about the long-term architectural developmental path, and also working on optimizations. Among other important past activities in these areas with which he has been associated was the Nimrod project, a design for the next generation routing and addressing architecture for the Internet. He was co-chair of the Nimrod Working Group (WG) of the IETF. Other past activities in these areas also include the DARPA-funded NewArch Project, and the IRTF Namespace Research Group. He has been a member of the TCP/IP Working Group (the group which started the Internet project as an ARPA-funded research effort) and its sucessors, up to the IETF, since 1977. He served as the Area Director for Internet Services of the IETF Steering Group from 1987-1992. He was a member of the Research Staff of the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1977-1982 and 1984-1986. While at M.I.T. he worked on packet switching and local area networks, and was responsible for the conception of the multi-protocol backbone and the multi-protocol router. After leaving M.I.T. he worked with a number of companies, including Proteon, to bring networking products based on work done at M.I.T. to the public. He resides in Yorktown, Virginia, with his family.