Abstract.

There are hundreds of millions of devices that share the Internet. The connections between them are so numerous and they change so rapidly that no one device can ever see more than a snapshot of a small corner. And yet, through the individual actions of each of them, and through their noisy interactions, the Internet as a whole manages to share capacity as fairly as possible. In fact it finds what economists call a social-welfare-maximizing allocation. The Internet's emergent behaviour was not a design goal, it was a scientific discovery that came more than a decade after the key algorithms were put in place. In this talk I will describe the history and the mathematics behind this discovery. I will also describe how we at UCL are building on it to create the next generation of Internet congestion control.