Paul
Francis
Associate Professor
Computer Science Dept.
Cornell University
4108 Upson Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
(607) 255-9223 (fax: 4428)
francis at cs.cornell.edu
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). Now that I have students doing my work for me, my interests have broadened a bit. I have ongoing projects in 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 work with a talented and dedicated group of students.
More details can be found in my CV, lists of publications and patents, and my research and teaching pages.