Kathleen Nichols is an American computer scientist and computer networking expert. Nichols is the founder and CEO o
Pollere, Inc
a network architecture and performance company based in California, US. Before founding Pollere, Nichols was VP of Network Science at

Packet Design Packet Design was an Austin, Texas-based network performance management software company credited with pioneering route analytics technology. This network monitoring technology analyzes routing protocols and structures in meshed IP networks by par ...

, where she was part of the founding team. Prior to Packet Design she was director of advanced Internet architectures in the Office of CTO at

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, m ...

Education and background

Nichols holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from

University of California, 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, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The university is composed of seventeen undergraduate and graduate schools and colle ...

. She has held several advanced architecture and research positions at Pollere, Cisco,

Bay Networks Bay Networks, Inc., was a network hardware vendor formed through the merger of Santa Clara, California, based SynOptics Communications and Billerica, Massachusetts based Wellfleet Communications on July 6, 1994. SynOptics was an important early ...

, Com21,

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), simply branded Philips, is a Dutch multinational health technology company that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, its world headquarters have been situated in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarter ...

Research Labs,

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...

, and

AT&T Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several labo ...

. In addition, she was co-chair of the IETF Differentiated Services Working Group, has held several positions with the IEEE Hot Interconnects Symposium, and has been a guest editor of both IEEE Software and IEEE Micro.

Research

Nichols' research focuses on networking and Internet performance. She has written about the problem of

bufferbloat Bufferbloat is the undesirable latency that comes from a router or other network equipment buffering too many data packets. Bufferbloat can also cause packet delay variation (also known as jitter), as well as reduce the overall network thro ...

, which can lead to failure with

Transmission Control Protocol The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main communications protocol, protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, th ...

congestion-avoidance algorithms. Bufferbloat causes problems such as high and variable latency, network bottlenecks, and dropped packets. As a buffer becomes full of packets for one TCP stream, packets from other network flows are dropped. The buffers then take some time to drain, before the TCP connection ramps back up to speed and then floods the buffers again. When the bufferbloat problem is present and the network is under load, even normal web page loads can take many seconds to complete, and simple DNS queries can fail due to timeouts. Beyond bufferbloat, Nichols has also published additional research on how to control queueing delay, how to improve network simulation with feedback, and how to navigate complexity to achieve high performance. From September 1984 to December 1985, Nichols was an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at

Oregon State University Oregon State University (OSU) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Corvallis, Oregon, United States. OSU offers more than 200 undergraduate degree programs and a variety of graduate and doctor ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nichols, Kathleen Year of birth missing (living people) Living people University of Pittsburgh alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni American computer scientists American women computer scientists 21st-century American women