Towards a field theory for networks
Jon Crowcroft
It is often claimed that Internet Traffic patterns are interesting
because the Internet puts few constraints on sources. This leads to
innovation. It also makes the study of Internet traffic, what we might
call the search for the Internet Erlang, very difficult. At the same
time, traffic control (congestion control) and engineering are both
hot topics.
What if ``flash crowds'' (a.k.a. slashdot), cascades, epidemics and so
on are the norm? What if the trend continues for network link capacity
to become flatter, with more equal capacity in the access and core, or
even more capacity in the access than the core (as in the early 1980s
with 10Mbps LANs versus Kbps links in the ARPANET)? How could we cope?
This is a paper about the use of field equations (e.g. gravitational,
electrical, magnetic, strong and weak atomic and so forth) as a future
model for managing network traffic. We believe that in the future, one
could move from this model to a very general prescriptive technique
for designing network control on different timescales, including
traffic engineering and the set of admission and congestion control
laws. We also speculate about the use of the same idea in wireless
networks.
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