Fluid models of integrated traffic and multipath routing (Q2494563)

This article presents a stochastic model to study flows in a network, primarily of interest for the internet. In particular, two types of flows are considered: file transfers and internet streaming traffic. The key difference between the two is that in the first case the volume of traffic is fixed, whereas in the latter it is the duration that is fixed. The article begins with a useful background on large-scale communication networks and the TCP and a survey of the existing literature. This is followed by a section describing several bandwidth sharing models, where issues such as fairness, utility and capacity are discussed. The third section presents the main results of the flow level stochastic model, which is followed by an investigation into large capacity scaling issues for fluid models. The last sections concentrate on a comparative study of the performance of coordinated multipath routing versus parallel routing. Several results, with proof, are presented throughout this very interesting article, which concludes with a list of relevant references.