Sally Floyd

Sally Floyd was a computer scientist at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. She retired in 2009. She is best known for her work on Internet congestion control, and is one of the top-ten most cited researchers in computer science.

Dr. Floyd received a BA in Sociology from the University of California - Berkeley in 1971. She received an MS in Computer Science in 1984 and a PhD in 1987, both from UC - Berkeley.

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. Almost all Internet routers use RED or something developed from it to manage network congestion. Floyd devised the now-common method of adding delay jitter to message timers to avoid synchronization.

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 Communication 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 (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. She has been involved in the Internet Advisory Board, and is one of the top-ten most cited researchers in computer science.

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