Sally Floyd

Biography Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, Floyd received a B.A. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971. She received an M.S. in computer science in 1987 and a Ph.D. in 1989, both from UC Berkeley. Her Ph.D. was completed under the supervision of Richard M. Karp.

Floyd is best known in the field of congestion control as the inventor of Random Early Detection ("RED") active queue management scheme, thus founding the field of Active Queue Management (AQM) with Van Jacobson.

Floyd, with Vern Paxson, in 1997 identified the lack of knowledge of network topology as the major obstacle in understanding how the Internet works. This paper, "Why We Don't Know How to Simulate the Internet", was re-published as "Difficulties in Simulating the Internet" in 2001 and won the IEEE Communications Society's William R. Bennett Prize Paper Award.

Floyd is also a co-author on the standard for TCP Selective acknowledgement (SACK), Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) and TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC).

She received the IEEE Internet Award in 2005 and the ACM SIGCOMM Award in 2007 for her contributions to congestion control.

Selected notable papers S. Floyd and V. Jacobson, "Random Early Detection Gateways for Congestion Avoidance", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (1993) S. Floyd and K. Fall, "Promoting the Use of End-to-End Congestion Control in the Internet", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (1993) V. Paxson and S. Floyd, "Wide Area Traffic: The Failure of Poisson Modeling", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (1995) M. Mathis, J. Mahdavi and S Floyd, A Romanow, "TCP Selective Acknowledgement Options", RFC 2018 (1996) S. Floyd and V. Paxson, "Why We Don't Know How to Simulate the Internet", Dec. 1997, Proceedings of the 1997 Winter Simulation Conference. Re-written as "Difficulties in Simulating the Internet", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 9, no. 4 (August 2001). Winner of the IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize Paper Award, 2001.