[Colloq] Reminder, Hiring Talk now in 149

[Rachel Bates]

TITLE: On-line, end-to-end congestion control

SPEAKER: Neal Young
	 Akamai Technologies

DATE: Friday, April 11, 2003, 10:30 AM

PLACE: CN 149

ABSTRACT:

Congestion control in the current Internet is accomplished mainly by
TCP/IP. To understand the macroscopic network behavior that results from
TCP/IP and similar end-to-end protocols, one main analytic technique is to
show that the protocol maximizes some global objective function of the
network traffic.

I'll describe a simple protocol that can be implemented in the current
Internet, and show that if all users of the network use the protocol, and
all connections last for at least logarithmically many rounds, then the
total aggregate throughput is near the maximum possible.  The analysis
uses techniques from recent analyses of Lagrangian-relaxation algorithms
for packing and covering problems. Previous results in the area use
different techniques - they generally analyze continuous analogues of
protocols using differential equations, and they don't show explicit
convergence rates.  This result also generalizes to allow
round-trip-times, connections that start and stop, and changing
capacities.

BIO-SKETCH:

Neal Young is currently at Akamai Technologies in Cambridge and a visiting
scientist at MIT.  Previously he was an assistant professor at Dartmouth
College, and before that a post-doc at Bell Laboratories. He got his PhD
from Princeton in 1991, his advisor was Robert Tarjan.  His research area
is the theoretical and practical design and analysis of algorithms,
specializing in approximation algorithms for combinatorial optimization,
including Lagrangian-relaxation algorithms, and algorithms for networks
and caching.  He has about 30 publications in the area over the last
decade.  For details see http://neal.young.name/vita .

Host:  Rajmohan Rajaraman
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