Paul T Congdon

Biography

Paul Congdon is an HP Fellow in the Networking and Communications Lab within HP Labs.  He is responsible for researching future directions and technologies for network infrastructure and software products.  In his 25 years in the networking industry, he has become widely esteemed as an inventor and leader in driving networking industry standards.

Congdon is the Vice Chairman of the IEEE 802.1 committee and Technical Advisor for the IETF RADIUS Extensions Working Group, and his long-time activities with the IEEE 802 standards efforts involved him in the creation of the Ethernet LAN. He is co-inventor of the commonly used TCP checksum offloading, a program for accelerating the networking performance of TCP/IP within servers. He also architected the method of distributing HP Networking software onto multiple processors, enabling HP switch software to scale between low-cost, single-chip solutions and high-end, multi-modular chassis systems.

After completing internships with IBM, Congdon joined HP in 1985 as a Software Development Engineer responsible for the creation of networking protocols within HP-UX. He expanded his focus to network infrastructure architecture and has been involved in the design of a wide range of network devices and technologies, including routers, Layer 2/3/4 switches, iSCSI storage devices, SNA, X.25, FDDI, Ethernet, wireless LANs, virtual LANs, link aggregation, LLDP, Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregators (VEPA) and access security protocols, including IEEE 802.1X.

Congdon earned Bachelor of Science, magna cum laude, and Master of Science degrees in computer science from California State University, Chico.   He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis.  He currently holds 11 patents related to the networking industry and has several more in process.

Research interests

Network Systems Architecture, Network Protocols, Network Switching, Ethernet, Data Center Networking, Virtualization, Client and Mobile Networking

Publications

P. Congdon, M. Farrens, and P. Mohapatra, "Packet Prediction for Speculative Cut-Through Switching," in ANCS-2008 San Jose, CA, 2008, p. 10.

P. Congdon, A. Fischer, and P. Mohapatra, "A Case for VEPA: Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator," HPL-2009-186, HP Laboratories, http://library.hp.com/techpubs/2009/HPL-2009-186.html, August 2009, p. 9

P. Reviriego, J.A. Maestro and P. Congdon., “Reduce Latency in Energy Efficient Ethernet Switches with Early Destination Lookup”,  in CommsDesign, http://www.commsdesign.com , April 19, 2010

Patents

11

Professional activities

Vice Chair, IEEE 802.1