home | articles | links | fun | about
Up to: Quick math and science observations

notes on electricity

Yep, if you have three available routes A, B, C with bandwidths 10, 4 and 1 the selfish router would send all trafic through route A in every case. An altruistic router would make a random choice between A, B, C such that A was chosen 2/3rds of the time and B, C were chosen in proportion 4:1 the rest of the time.

You can then tweak further by using traffic information. If the system is unloaded then use A all the time.

The same observation applies to the problem where traffic alternates between two routes rather than dividing itself evenly. That is elementary control theory. The problem is that the response has too high a gain factor, in effect the gain factor is infinite so instead of being shared across the routes the system is going into oscillation.

There is an obvious solution to that problem, you measure the change in the traffic statistics and moderate your response to changes.

This is the sort of thing the IETF should be doing. Unfortunately the IETF has been out to lunch for many years now. They have failled to respond with any urgency to most of the issues facing the net. Most of the participants seem to use it as a substitute social life rather than as a place to get things done.

Resistance:

path 10
path 1

total movement: 11 (10 through one, 1 through other). each goes as fast as it can. contributes to total. simple, eh?