Network Modelling in the 21st Century,
Royal Society Discussion Meeting,
London, December 1999.
This talk uses a variety of mathematical models to explore some of the consequences of rapidly growing communications capacity for the evolution of the Internet. It is argued that queueing delays may become small in comparison with propagation delays, and that differentiation between traffic classes within the network may become redundant. Instead, a simple packet network may be able to support an arbitrarily differentiated and constantly evolving set of services, by conveying information on incipient congestion to intelligent end-nodes which themselves determine what should be their demands on the packet network.
Slides and the paper. The M3I project.
Background references: