Handley received a PhD from University College London in 1997 for research on scalable Internet multimedia conferencing systems, under the supervision of Jon Crowcroft. UCL, founded in 1826 as England's first university to admit students regardless of race, class, religion, or gender, developed a major tradition in scientific and engineering research during the period of Handley's doctoral work.
Handley developed his early research in Internet multimedia, multicast, and conference-control protocols, contributing to the technical foundations of voice over Internet Protocol, videoconferencing, and related real-time communications. His work included algorithm and protocol design, prototype implementation, and participation in the Internet Engineering Task Force, the international standards organization responsible for documenting many Internet protocols.
At the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, an independent nonprofit research institute affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, he joined a major networking research community and helped establish the AT&T Center for Internet Research. He co-founded the XORP open-source router project in 2000, creating a research-oriented platform for experimenting with routing protocols and network control.
Handley joined University College London in 2003 and became Professor of Networked Systems in its Department of Computer Science, where he leads the Networks Research Group. UCL's research group works on algorithms, protocols, and systems for efficient, reliable, and secure computer communication. His research has addressed Internet architecture, congestion control, routing, denial-of-service defenses, multimedia communication, multipath transport, satellite networks, and high-performance data-centre networking.
He co-founded Correct Networks in 2019 with Costin Raiciu to develop high-performance networking protocols for artificial-intelligence systems. The company was acquired by Broadcom in 2022, after which Handley contributed to data-centre networking and the development of Ultra Ethernet-related technologies. Broadcom is a semiconductor and infrastructure-software company whose products include networking technologies used in data-centre and communications systems.
By 2024, Handley was working at OpenAI on networking for very large artificial-intelligence training clusters. His recent work includes Multipath Reliable Connection, a transport protocol designed to distribute traffic across multiple paths and improve resilience and tail-latency performance in large-scale training networks.
Handley co-founded the AT&T Center for Internet Research at the International Computer Science Institute, a research program that brought together major contributors to Internet architecture, congestion control, and networking systems.
He co-founded the XORP open-source router project in 2000, providing a complete research platform for implementing and testing Internet routing protocols.
He authored or co-authored numerous Internet standards documents, including foundational specifications for Session Initiation Protocol, multimedia session description, multicast, congestion control, and Multipath TCP.
His research contributed to Internet multimedia communication, voice-over-IP, videoconferencing, multicast delivery, multipath transport, satellite routing, and high-performance data-centre networks.
(University College London doctoral thesis examining scala...)
1997(Co-authored research describing Multipath Reliable Connec...)
2025(Research on redesigning data-centre networking and protoc...)
2017(Co-authored research describing an edge-queued datagram s...)
2022(Research examining low-latency routing strategies for sat...)
2018(Co-authored the specification of coupled congestion-contr...)
2011(Co-authored the specification for Datagram Congestion Con...)
2006(Co-authored Internet standard RFC 2327, which specified a...)
1998(Co-authored the early Internet standard for Session Initi...)
1999(Co-authored architectural guidance for Multipath TCP, whi...)
2011(Co-authored an Internet specification addressing the beha...)
2000(Co-authored RFC 2974, which defined a protocol for announ...)
2000(Co-authored a specification extending TCP to support simu...)
2013Handley has participated in the Internet Engineering Task Force and related Internet-standardization bodies, where he has contributed to protocol development and technical direction. He previously served on the Internet Architecture Board and held leadership roles in IETF and Internet Research Task Force working groups concerned with multimedia session control and reliable multicast.
Served on the Routing Area Directorate and Transport Area Directorate and chaired the Multiparty Multimedia Session Control working group.
Internet Engineering Task Force , United States
Previously served as a member of the board responsible for providing broad technical direction for Internet architecture.
Internet Architecture Board , United States
Chaired the Reliable Multicast Research Group.
Internet Research Task Force , United States
