Mathematical models of the Internet

Frank Kelly

Auckland, New Zealand, April 2012.

The Internet has attracted the attention of many theoreticians, eager to understand the remarkable success of this diverse and complex artefact. One strand of this effort has been a framework that allows the various detailed algorithms used to control congestion, choose routes and allocate resources to be seen as a distributed mechanism solving a global optimization problem. The talk will review the framework, and discuss topics such as fairness and stability, as well as current engineering efforts to improve the reliability and robustness of the Internet.

slides, video.

Reference:

The mathematics of traffic in networks.
In "The Princeton Companion to Mathematics" (Editor Timothy Gowers; June Barrow-Green and Imre Leader, associate editors) Princeton University Press, 2008. 862-870.