Study of Proposed Internet Congestion Control Mechanisms

摘要

When first introduced in the early 1980s the Internet appeared to be an interesting engineering curiosity, providing resource sharing and data communication services to support scientific researchers. Beginning with the introduction of the World Wide Web (circa 1995), the fundamental data communication services provided by the Internet transformed into a global infrastructure for commerce, education and entertainment. Later developments (circa 2005) built upon so-called Web Services to provide innovative social networking technologies that citizens the world over can use to organize and collaborate around collective interests. Along the way, innovative cell phones and other handheld devices were introduced and integrated with the Internet and the Web to extend available information and interaction services to people anytime, anywhere. The future promises a globe interconnected by large, distributed information networks, where people routinely interact in new and unexpected ways. Realizing this future relies in large part on our ability to understand and engineer globally distributed systems of interconnected hardware and software components, including their use by people. At present, society is technologically capable of building such systems but lacks the fundamental knowledge required to understand and predict macroscopic behaviors that may arise from complex interactions as such systems evolve with the addition of new technologies and new patterns of use. A similar lack of knowledge may impede progress with respect to other large systems engineered by society. For these reasons, researchers in the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) embarked upon a measurement science based program of research for complex systems. The NIST Complex Systems Program aims to investigate and evaluate methods and tools that system designers might adopt to improve scientific understanding of large distributed systems, such as information networks, electric grids and transportation webs. As part of the NIST Complex Systems Program, this special publication investigates and evaluates modeling and analysis methods that can be applied to predict and understand macroscopic behavior and variations in user experience that may arise as engineers introduce changes in software components into a large information network, such as the Internet.