Internet congestion

There’s recently been a lot of publicity about the views on internet congestion of a visiting Brit.  Next Tuesday, in Auckland, there’s a public lecture on internet congestion by a different visiting Brit, one who actually knows something about the topic.   Frank Kelly is a Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.  His research is on the design and control of  networks: both abstract ones and concrete ones such as the Internet and the traffic system.

Professor Kelly is visiting the University of Auckland to work with researchers here, and will kick off his visit with the public lecture:

The Internet has attracted the attention of many theoreticians, eager to understand the remarkable success of this diverse and complex artefact. One strand of this effort has been a framework that allows the various detailed algorithms used to control congestion, choose routes and allocate resources to be seen as a distributed mechanism solving a global optimization problem. The talk will review the framework, and discuss topics such as fairness and stability, as well as current engineering efforts to improve the reliability and robustness of the Internet.