Bernardo A. Huberman and Rajan M. Lukose
Dynamics of Computation Group
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Palo Alto, CA 94304
huberman@parc.xerox.com
Since the Internet is a public good and its numerous users are not
charged in proportion to their use, it appears rational for individuals
to consume bandwidth greedily while thinking that their actions have
little effect on the overall performance of the Internet. Because every
individual can reason this way, the whole Internet's performance can
degrade considerably, making everyone worse off. An analysis of the
congestions created by such dilemmas predicts that they are intermittent
in nature with definite statistical properties, leading to short lived
spikes in congestion. Experiments in which we measured Internet
latencies over a wide range of conditions and locations confirm these
predictions, thus providing a possible microscopic mechanism for the
observed intermittent congestions of the Internet
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