Rémi Després (born January 16, 1943) is a French

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the l ...

and

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

known for his contributions on

data networking A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ma ...

Education

In 1961–1963, Rémi Després attended

École Polytechnique École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, Savoi ...

of Paris, of which he holds an Engineer degree. At

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

, he received a

master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice.

in 1967, and a Ph.D degree in 1969, both in the EECS Department.

Career

From 1963 to 1971 at

CNET ''CNET'' (short for "Computer Network") is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos on technology and consumer electronics globally. ''CNET'' originally produced content for radio and televi ...

and

, he specialized in

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

s and

time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence a ...

operating systems. From 1971 to 1980, Rémi Després was in charge of R&D of the French PTT on

packet switching In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping Data (computing), data into ''network packet, packets'' that are transmitted over a digital Telecommunications network, network. Packets are made of a header (computing), header and ...

. He was one of the leading "innovators who worked across the boundaries of computers and communications" in the 1970s. As such, he introduced the concept of graceful "saturated operation", which was referenced by

Bob Kahn Robert Elliot Kahn (born December 23, 1938) is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the hea ...

and

Vint Cerf Vinton Gray Cerf (; born June 23, 1943) is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of " the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that include t ...

in their seminal 1974 paper on

internetworking Internetworking is the practice of interconnecting multiple computer networks, such that any pair of hosts in the connected networks can exchange messages irrespective of their hardware-level networking technology. The resulting system of interco ...

, ''"A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication".'' He named and formalized the concept of

virtual circuit A virtual circuit (VC) is a means of transporting data over a data network, based on packet switching and in which a connection is established within the network between two endpoints. The network, rather than having a fixed data rate reservation ...

s and, with his team at

, he validated it on the RCP experimental network. He then successfully submitted for the X.25 Recommendation of

CCITT The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is one of the three sectors (divisions or units) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It is responsible for coordinating standards for telecommunications and Information Commu ...

, the standard of public data networks of the 1970s–1980s. He was the first Chief Technical Officer in charge of the French TRANSPAC network whose

X.25 X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for packet-switched data communication in wide area networks (WAN). It was originally defined by the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT, now ITU-T) in a series of drafts ...

service has been operational from 1978 to 2011. After working one year for Cap Gemini Sogeti, and four years for SESA, in 1985 Rémi Després founded the LAN and Frame-Relay-products enterprise RCE, a company acquired in 1996 by the CS Group. In 1998, he founded a second startup, StreamCore SA, specialised in

quality of service Quality of service (QoS) is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, such as a telephony or computer network, or a cloud computing service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network. To quantitat ...

management in

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

, the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

technology. When Streamcore SA was terminated in 2003, its StreamGroomer products were taken over by a new company, Streamcore Systems SA. Since 2003, Rémi Després has been working as an independent researcher and consultant, mainly contributing to

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

to facilitate deployment of

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

, the

protocol Protocol may refer to: Sociology and politics * Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states * Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state * Etiquette, a code of personal behavior Science and technolog ...

that had become necessary to extend the number of customer addresses of the

. In particular, he invented and promoted

6rd 6rd is a mechanism to facilitate IPv6 rapid deployment across IPv4 infrastructures of Internet service providers (ISPs). It is derived from 6to4, a preexisting mechanism to transfer IPv6 packets over the IPv4 network, with the significant chan ...

, a mechanism whereby Free, an

Internet Service Provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...

, deployed IPv6 service several years before similar network operators, and in only five weeks. Another notable contribution concerned 4rd, a technology to maintain a residual

IPv4 Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the fourth version of the Internet Protocol (IP). It is one of the core protocols of standards-based internetworking methods in the Internet and other packet-switched networks. IPv4 was the first version de ...

service across IPv6-only networks. He also proposed a mechanism for

Internet Service Providers An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privatel ...

to assign IPv6 addresses into customer sites that still have IPv4-only

residential gateway A residential gateway is a small consumer-grade gateway which bridges network access between connected local area network (LAN) hosts to a wide area network (WAN) (such as the Internet) via a modem, or directly connects to a WAN (as in EttH), wh ...

s, with the distinctive feature that IPv6 traffic between devices of a same site remains within this site. In 2011, Rémi Després and Alexandre Cassen received the Itojun Service Award of the

Internet Society The Internet Society (ISOC) is an American nonprofit advocacy organization founded in 1992 with local chapters around the world. Its mission is "to promote the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people ...

for their

work.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Despres, Remi 1943 births Living people French computer scientists École Polytechnique alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni Internet pioneers

Education

Career

See also

References