On the Fractal Behavior of TCP
Abstract
I will speak on a simple dynamical system which models the Internet protocol TCP. The simple model embodies TCP's "additive increase, multiplicative decrease" rule. Two sources s1 and s2 send packets at varying rates r1 and r2 to a recipient; whenever packets are lost, the sender halves its sending rate.
We prove that for infinitely many choices of the parameters, the set of feasible rate pairs that can occur in the limit is a fractal. (This does not mean, however, that the traffic is statistically self-similar.)
No previous knowledge of TCP or of fractals will be assumed. This is joint work with Anna Gilbert of AT&T Labs--Research.
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Dr. Howard Karloff received his PhD in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. Before joining AT&T Labs, he was Assistant Professor at University of Chicago and Associate and Full Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. He serves as an editor for Journal of Algorithms and on the NSF Panel for Theory of Computation, was in the technical committee at the flagship conference Foundation of Theoretical Computer Science (FOCS) and the chair of the Symposium of Discrete Algorithms (SODA). He is the author of about 40 journal articles, including two in the Journal of the ACM, and the book "Linear Programming". His research interests span theoretical computer science, with an emphasis on algorithms. |