Seminars will be held in the Lecture Theatre 1 - William Gates Building, Computer Laboratory at 4.15pm

	See also: Security seminars Logic and Semantics seminars Additional meetings weekly timetable for other meetings

Theoretical Limits on Distributed Congestion Control

Frank Kelly

Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge

Internet congestion control can be viewed as a resource allocation mechanism implemented via a distributed computation by end-systems. It provides a concrete, measurable example of an economic tatonnement process, with TCP's congestion avoidance algorithms playing the role of a `Walrasian auctioneer' searching for market clearing allocations. What are the theoretical limitations upon what can be achieved by such a distributed computation? In this talk we review recent progress, and discuss the constraints imposed by: limited information available to end-systems; the finite speed of light; inherent randomness; and incentive compatibility.