Speaker: Fern Hunt, NIST

Title: Dynamic Congestion and Control Through Random Assignment of Routes

Abstract: The Internet has become a central means of communication on a global scale. Its emergence over the last two decades has been facilitated by the introduction of congestion control methodologies such as TCP, that allow millions of users to share network resources without causing congestion collapse. Beginning with the work of Frank Kelly, researchers have discovered that many currently used protocols designed to minimize congestion and to provide some notion of "fairness" can be viewed as a distributed, iterative algorithm for solving a global optimization problem. With this it is now possible to use mathematical analysis to help study, characterize and design protocols . We will discuss a discrete dynamical system that models a congestion protocol that randomly assigns traffic to multiple paths joining a source and destination in a network. The optimization problem associated with the system will be discussed. Two sample network topologies show how the link capacities and topology strongly influence the range of values for the stable operation of the associated protocol.

Place: Science and Technology Building I, Room 242

Refreshments will be served before the talk at 3:00 p.m. in Room 222.

Department of Mathematical Sciences
George Mason University
4400 University Drive, MS 3F2
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
http://math.gmu.edu/
Tel. 703-993-1460, Fax. 703-993-1491