Title: Rethinking Traffic Management: Using Optimization Decomposition
       to Derive New Architectures
by Jennifer Rexford

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 slowly evolved without a conscious design. In this
work, we perform a top-down redesign of traffic management using
recent innovations in optimization theory. First, we propose an
objective function that captures the goals of end users and network
operators alike.  Using optimization decomposition techniques, we
derive distributed algorithms where sources adapt their sending
rates along multiple paths, based on feedback from the links.
Optimization theory guarantees that these algorithms converge to
a stable and optimal point, and simulations allow us to compare
rate of convergence, robustness to tunable parameters, and
performance under realistic traffic.  Combining the best features
of each algorithm, we construct a traffic management protocol that
is distributed, adaptive, robust, flexible, and easy to manage.

This is joint work with Jiayue He, Ma'ayan Bresler, and Mung Chiang.