Congestion on the Internet : operator responses, economic analysis, and improving the network architecture

Our thesis presents the results of monitoring traffic management techniques of network providers. We find that in addition to complete blocking of traffic flows on some transport layer ports, providers are also actively managing traffic based upon application layer content. We document how providers are engaged in not just deep packet inspection, but deep flow inspection - tracking, shaping, and actively managing the state of individual flows. We explain why network operators attempt to manage traffic in these manners by looking at both the technical and economic forces influencing their decisions. We argue that inefficient congestion management and contractual practices of network providers are not unexpected given the limitations of the existing Internet architecture. Indeed, managing network traffic based upon transport and application layer content are likely to become more prevalent as high bandwidth demanding applications such as video and peer-to-peer increasingly dominate the traffic mix on networks. The existing Internet architecture leaves network operators with little architectural support for making more efficient traffic management decisions or contractual relationships. We therefore consider how making the architectural and protocol changes proposed by Briscoe et al [14, 17, 16], might help better align the economic and technical interests of traffic senders and traffic carriers. Briscoe's proposal would enable traffic management and/or contractual relationships to be based directly on congestion information. Our contribution is to further the analysis of the economic implications of this proposal. We apply both game theory and elementary economic analysis to better understand the proposal's advantages and limitations.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Bauer, Steven J. (Steven Joseph), 1976-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David Clark.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44406

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/44406