News & Events

A Model for Analyzing the Interaction Between Bandwidth Demand and Supply

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Date: 01-26-2005
Start Time: 2:00pm
End Time: 3:00pm
Speaker: Y.C. Tay
From: National University of Singapore
Location: CEPSR Interschool Lab
Hosted by: Distributed Network Analysis (DNA) Lab

The Internet has performed admirably well in coping with an  exponential growth in traffic volume. Much credit for this  robustness goes to TCP's congestion control mechanisms.  However, TCP only controls the flow in a connection, whereas  the number of connections is controlled by users. Borrowing  terminology from economics, TCP controls bandwidth supply  while the user controls bandwidth demand, and their  equilibrium determines the network state.

There is already a huge literature on modeling bandwidth  supply, but very little has been done for bandwidth demand.  This talk models separately this supply and demand, and use  them to analyze the interaction between network and user  behavior, and their complementary roles in Internet  congestion.

(This is work in progress, done in collaboration with Robert  Morris.)