Rethinking Internet Traffic Management: From Multiple Decompositions to a Practical Protocol

In the Internet today, traffic management spans congestion control (at end hosts), routing protocols (on routers), and traffic engineering (by network operators). Historically, this division of functionality evolved organically. In this paper, the authors perform a top-down redesign of traffic management using recent innovations in optimization theory. First, they propose an objective function that captures the goals of end users and network operators. Using all known optimization decomposition techniques, they generate four distributed algorithms that divide traffic over multiple paths based on feedback from the network links.