Farsighted users harness network time-diversity

Abstract— Fluctuations in network conditions are a common phenomenon. They arise in the current wired Internet due to changes in demand, and in wireless networks due to changing interference patterns. However, current congestion control design typically does not account for this, and in this sense the majority of congestion controllers proposed so far can be deemed as “myopic”. The present work deals with the following question: how should network end-users exploit such temporal fluctuations? We introduce a formal framework, in which time diversity is explicitly described by phases in network condition. We propose as bandwidth allocation criterion the solution to an optimization problem, which features both classical (myopic) users and so-called farsighted users. We identify the corresponding farsighted user strategy as that maximizing throughput subject to a social norm related to TCPfriendliness. We establish basic desirable properties of the resulting allocations. We propose ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Peter B. Key, Laurent Massoulié, Milan Vojnovic
• Keywords: Communications, Current Congestion Control, Farsighted Users, INFOCOM 2005, Network Conditions