Preface

Summary

Communication networks underpin our modern world, and provide fascinating and challenging examples of large-scale stochastic systems. Randomness arises in communication systems at many levels: for example, the initiation and termination times of calls in a telephone network, or the statistical structure of the arrival streams of packets at routers in the Internet. How can routing, flow control, and connection acceptance algorithms be designed to work well in uncertain and random environments? And can we design these algorithms using simple local rules so that they produce coherent and purposeful behaviour at the macroscopic level?

The first two parts of the book will describe a variety of classical models that can be used to help understand the behaviour of large-scale stochastic networks. Queueing and loss networks will be studied, as well as random access schemes and the concept of an effective bandwidth. Parallels will be drawn with models from physics, and with models of traffic in road networks.

The third part of the book will study more recently developed models of packet traffic and of congestion control algorithms in the Internet. This is an area of some practical importance, with network operators, content providers, hardware and software vendors, and regulators actively seeking ways of delivering new services reliably and effectively. The complex interplay between end-systems and the network has attracted the attention of economists as well as mathematicians and engineers.

We describe enough of the technological background to communication networks to motivate our models, but no more. Some of the ideas described in the book are finding application in financial, energy, and economic networks as computing and communication technologies transform these areas.