Traffic Dynamics of Computer Networks

Abstract: Two important aspects of the Internet, namely the properties of its topology and the characteristics of its data traffic, have attracted growing attention of the physics community. My thesis has considered problems of both aspects. First I studied the stochastic behavior of TCP, the primary algorithm governing traffic in the current Internet, in an elementary network scenario consisting of a standalone infinite-sized buffer and an access link. The effect of the fast recovery and fast retransmission (FR/FR) algorithms is also considered. I showed that my model can be extended further to involve the effect of link propagation delay, characteristic of WAN. I continued my thesis with the investigation of finite-sized semi-bottleneck buffers, where packets can be dropped not only at the link, but also at the buffer. I demonstrated that the behavior of the system depends only on a certain combination of the parameters. Moreover, an analytic formula was derived that gives the ratio of packet loss rate at the buffer to the total packet loss rate. This formula makes it possible to treat buffer-losses as if they were link-losses. Finally, I studied computer networks from a structural perspective. I demonstrated through fluid simulations that the distribution of resources, specifically the link bandwidth, has a serious impact on the global performance of the network. Then I analyzed the distribution of edge betweenness in a growing scale-free tree under the condition that a local property, the in-degree of the "younger" node of an arbitrary edge, is known in order to find an optimum distribution of link capacity. The derived formula is exact even for finite-sized networks. I also calculated the conditional expectation of edge betweenness, rescaled for infinite networks.