How to measure the impact of the research conducted in a university lab ? There are many metrics that could be used, funding bodies have a tendency to look at quantitative metrics such as number of publications, number of citations, ... Within the IP Networking Lab, our main objective is to perform good and useful work. Some of this work has been recognised with prestigious awards :

• Benjamin Hesmans, Gregory Detal, Sébastien Barré, Raphael Bauduin and Olivier Bonaventure. SMAPP : Towards Smart Multipath TCP-enabled APPlications. Proc. Conext 2015, Heidelberg, December 2015. IETF 2016 Applied Networking Research Prize
• Stefano Vissicchio, Olivier Tilmans, Laurent Vanbever and Jennifer Rexford. Central Control Over Distributed Routing. SIGCOMM, 2015. Selected as best paper and received a IETF 2016 Applied Networking Research Prize
• Stefano Vissicchio and Luca Cittadini. FLIP the (Flow) Table: Fast LIghtweight Policy-preserving SDN Updates. INFOCOM, 2016. Selected as the Best Paper Award Runner-up
• Stefano Vissicchio, Laurent Vanbever, Cristel Pelter, Luca Cittadini, Pierre François and Olivier Bonaventure. Improving Network Agility with Seamless BGP Reconfigurations. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 21(3):990-1002, June 2013. IETF ANRP (Applied Networking Research Prize) 2013.
• Marco Chiesa, Luca Cittadini, Giuseppe Di Battista, Laurent Vanbever and Stefano Vissicchio. Using Routers to Build Logic Circuits: How Powerful is BGP?. ICNP, 2013. ICNP Best Paper Award.
• Laurent Vanbever. Methods and Techniques for Disruption-Free Network Reconfiguration. PhD thesis. Université catholique de Louvain, October 2012. ICTEAM Best Thesis Award 2013 and runner-up SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award
• Costin Raiciu, Christoph Paasch, Sébastien Barré, Alan Ford, Michio Honda, Fabien Duchene, Olivier Bonaventure and Mark Handley. How Hard Can It Be? Designing and Implementing a Deployable Multipath TCP. USENIX Symposium of Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'12), San Jose (CA), 2012, USENIX Community award
• Pierre François, Mike Shand and Olivier Bonaventure. Disruption-free topology reconfiguration in OSPF Networks. IEEE INFOCOM, Anchorage, USA, May 2007. Best paper award

In addition to these scientific awards, the Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice textbook received one of the first Open Textbook challenge organised by the Saylor foundation in the US.

We also develop open-source software that is used by researchers and industry. Some examples include :

• the reference implementation of Multipath TCP in the Linux kernel
• the implementation of IPv6 Segment Routing which is now part of release 4.10+ of the Linux kernel
• the C-BGPsimulator
• the OpenLISP implementation in FreeBSD