Robert G. Gallager, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
This tutorial is intended for researchers and engineers who want to acquire some perspective on the critical problems involved in the evolution of networks toward both higher speeds and different qualities of service.
Robert Gallager has been a professor at MIT since 1960 and his current title is Fujitsu Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Co-Director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. He is a consultant to Motorola Codex. He is the author of the textbook Information Theory and Reliable Communication (NY: Wiley, 1968) and co-author of Data Networks (Prentice-Hall, Ed. 2, 1992). His major research interests are data communication networks, mobile networks, information theory, and communication theory. Dr. Gallager is a Fellow of the IEEE and received the IEEE Baker Prize Paper Award in 1966, and the William Bennet Prize Paper Award in 1993. He received the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1990. He is a member of the U. S. National Academy of Engineering and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Rapid advances in both optical fiber technology and solid state technology have made universal, high speed, wide area networks a practical possibility. The integration of voice, data, images, and video within a single network suggest that many new applications for such networks will evolve. In these integrated networks of the future, there will be a wide range of user requirements, varying over data rates, burstiness levels, tolerable delay, reliability, etc. History suggests, however, that the evolution to such networks will be chaotic and that internetworking between heterogeneous collections of high speed and lower speed networks will be necessary. We discuss a number of current approaches for dealing with these varied requirements in single networks, and then discuss the problems of meeting such requirements at the internet level.