The Internet has performed admirably well
in coping with an exponential growth in traffic volume.
Much credit for this robustness
goes to TCP's congestion control mechanisms.
However, TCP only controls the flow in a connection,
whereas the number of connections is controlled by users.
Borrowing terminology from economics,
TCP controls bandwidth supply while
the user controls bandwidth demand,
and their equilibrium determines the network state.
There is already a huge literature on modeling bandwidth supply,
but very little has been done for bandwidth demand.
This talk models separately this supply and demand,
and use them to analyze the interaction
between network and user behavior,
and their complementary roles in Internet congestion.
(This is work in progress, done in collaboration with Robert Morris.)
Y.C. Tay received his B.Sc. degree from the University of Singapore
and Ph.D. degree from Harvard University. He has a joint appointment
with the Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science
at the National University of Singapore.
His main research interest is performance modeling
(transaction processing, multimedia load-sharing, parallel rendering,
wireless access and page replacement).
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~tayyc