Dr. Krishan Sabnani
Award Year: 2005 | Degree Year: 1975
Dr. Krishan Sabnani received his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi in 1975 and went on to obtain a Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York in 1981, also in Electrical Engineering.
Dr. Krishan Sabnani is currently Senior Vice President (Networking Research) at Bell Labs, USA. He joined Bell Labs in 1981. He worked as an individual researcher until 1993. During this time he made significant contributions to conformance test generation, protocol validation, automated converter generation, and reverse engineering. He also designed several protocols such as the SNR protocol, Reliable Multicast Transport Protocol (RMTP), and AirMail. One example of the impact of Dr. Sabnani’s research is his work on RMTP, which enabled reliable multicasting of data over the Internet. RMTP makes reliable multicasting intrinsically scalable. This research has also been very influential in the area of multicast congestion control. As another example of impact, Dr. Sabnani was the first to apply formal methods to conformance testing, which previously used only ad-hoc techniques. These techniques resulted in a reduction in test time from weeks to a few hours.
Dr. Sabnani started a wireless networking research department in Bell Labs in 1993, and in 2000 he was promoted to lead the broader networking research effort. He played an important role in defining Lucent’s 3G wireless data strategy as well as creating differentiated global roaming solutions.
Dr. Sabnani holds 37 patents and has published more than 70 papers.
Dr. Sabnani has received the 2005 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award and the 2005 IEEE W. Wallace McDowell Award – the only person ever to receive both awards. He is a Bell Labs Fellow. He is also a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). In 1991 he received the Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award from the IEEE Communications Society. He also received President of India’s Gold Medal from IIT Delhi in 1975 and the Institution of Engineers’ (India) Gold Medal for 1975.
In honoring Dr. Sabnani, IIT Delhi recognizes the contributions made by him as a Researcher and Technologist. Through his achievements, Dr. Krishan Sabnani has brought glory to the name of this Institute.
