Slashdot Mirror
'Selfish Routing' Slows the Internet
Smaz writes "Science Blog reports that a little love could speed things up on the Net. "Self-interest can deplete a common resource. It seems this also applies to the Internet and other computer networks, which are slowed by those who hurry the most. Fortunately, say computer scientists at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. , there is a limit to how bad the slowdown can get. And after developing tools to measure how much the performance of a particular network suffers, they say, the way to get improved performance on the Internet is the same as the way to maintain air and water quality: altruism helps."
If you've got to rely on the goodwill of others to get by, you're totally screwed.
another resource depleting mechanism known as "Slashdotting"
__________
[Big Brick Wall]
We're going to end up with 'wired weathermen' probably. Maybe even those little wooden boxes with a wind-speed measurer on them attached to every router in the world. :-)
Game theory, anyone?
...that this isn't the guys at Cornell just trying to capture more bandwidth for themselves? Seems like a good idea to me.
Me: Don't use as much bandwidth and everyone will go faster!
World: Hey! That seems like a good idea.
Me: (aside) Mwuhahahaha
Posting as directed.
Reasearch networks are particular well at this sports: For example, the German Research Network (DFN) has a strict anti-peering policy. GÉANT, a European research network, appears to accepts only links to a single research network operator in each member country.
Of course, the most important aspect of such networks is that the bandwidth they offer is helpful in Dick Size Wars at supercomputing conferences, so it's not a terribly loss for the Internet at large.
Somehow the only conclusion I could draw from the article is that using the network slows it down. Right, so could somebody explain what the article is trying to say?
Eventually the system will settle to an equilibrium that mathematicians call a Nash flow, which will be, on the average, slower than the ideal.
If nobody goes for the blond, we all get laid. Somebody go tell the routers.
Cnet's got a write up on this too.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Maybe I am just a lowly CCNP but is this all just a theory paper about the problems with "routing" or were there specifics about current routing protocols that should be updated or current practices that should be changed. Please help, everyone knows that the current routing could be better but theory stuff just does not help us much.
'Cool! One meg left! .......huh? WTF?!!? Disconnected?! You dirty SOB!..FUUuuuuuuuccCCCKKK!'
Given the growth of walled gardens, of email attacks, of DoS, of more traffic channeled through fewer fat pipes owned by fewer public/non-profit organizations, is this still possible?
***Foucault is watching you..***
That has got to be the funniest thing I have read in a LONG time!
It seems the researchers at Pinko U finally realize that routers have always been programmed using the enlightened-self-interest model of bandwidth utilization. It's time to shut them down.
The last thing we need is lazy, welfare dependant internet backbones sitting around all day watching The Dukes of Hazzard and drinking Lite Beer. If the altruists win this round, AOL transforms from the gated-suburb of the internet into the "Projects". Aren't we taxed enough?
It basically says that network congestion is like congestion on highways. If everybody is trying to change lanes all the time, they might save a bit of time for themselves, but on the whole they will slow down traffic for everybody.
In theory, this may slow down the internet by something like 50-60% at most. Nobody really knows how well the Internet conforms to the mathematical model, however. Any benefit from trying to fix the problem might be outweighed by the cost of implementing a solution.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
this is why I hate download managers, especially ones that create dozens of connections to download segments of large files.
My flatmate does that with eDonkey on TWO of his computers and squashed our bandwidth for a week (downloading pr0n of course)
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
As the article states this is lab-stuff, how it holds on the real internet isn't known.
So lets do some research and if it really makes a diffrence we could route downloads larger then a MB thru other ways, since a 100 ms increase in delay time doesn't matter if your download takes more then 20 seconds.
But the cost for routing large streams in other ways then small streams probably won't be justified.
I say FTTH!
I suppose this is the heart of the article, btw:
:-)
"if routers choose the route that looks the least congested, they are doing selfish routing. As soon as that route clogs up, the routers change their strategies and choose other, previously neglected routes. Eventually the system will settle to an equilibrium that mathematicians call a Nash flow, which will be, on the average, slower than the ideal. "
Now, hasn't there been a problem some time a long time ago in early Internet history where parts of the internet entered a state of self oscillation. I recall this was later fixed somehow to a point by revising some protocols.
I remember it basically as the problem where lots of routers (for some reason) started sending packets to one path, it got very congested, all routers switched to another, congested, etc.
I only have very vague memories since I took the course where I heard it some years ago. Perhaps I'm only full of bullshit.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I wish I could consider this funny, but it's 9 out of 10 times true. Of course RL isn't any better ;p
If the "altruistic" behavior results in a better network, then isn't there a benefit for the altruistic behavior? Doesn't it cease being altruistic if there is a benefit? Aaggh! I'm caught in another Prisoner's Dilemma with an uncertain number of moves!
Where's my Dawkins? (That's twice today I've thought of him).
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
I would have had first post but it got stuck in a jam in Toronto.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
It appears that they are claiming routers pick the fastest route to push packets down, which can in turn cause that route to become congested, thus slowing it down, and then the router picks a new route, causing it to become congested and slow down, and so on.
Supposedly, if the router picked the fastest AND least congested route, then some packets might take a little longer to get to their destination, but the overall latency of the internet would decrease.
In theory. In reality, I don't know how much peering arrangements change the equation. You see, if you are a network provider, you have two goals with peering: dump enough traffic onto your peer points so that you are exchanging about equal amounts with your peer AND get traffic that isn't bound for your network OFF your network as quickly as possible.
In practice, this means ISPs who peer have a large incentive to route packets coming from peer parter A directly to peer partner B, without regard for what that does to the latency of the packet, nor the congestion of the peering partners. The peered packets become more like the hot potato, bouncing around peer points until they actually arrive near the destination network. That lowers overall efficiency as well. (companies like Internap don't peer for this reason; they pay for all connection points even though they have enough traffic to get peering points for free. They cost more, but they have very low latency, packet loss, etc).
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Essentially they're saying we should ban US citizens ;-)
It said something about not taking the least congested route, which means taking a route that is already congested. "But if routers choose the route that looks the least congested, they are doing selfish routing." But it seems to me that by not chosing the least congested route, all they are doing is mucking things up for those using the more congested route.
While I grant your point from a literalist standpoint, the terms "altruistic" and "selfish" in these scenarios generally relate not to the aggregate, but to the individual. Any given individual acting "selfishly" WRT routing will win out vs. all acting altruistically for the benefit of the whole.
;-)
Or, to quote Spock, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few [but that doesn't make my dying selfish]."
'the internet' is faster then my connection to it, does it really matter?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
self love also makes you go blind and grows hair on your palm...
well there is some porn on the internet... isn't there?
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
On Slashdot, the Objectivists are the usual crowd!
Amen, brother. You ass.
Road traffic works this way too.
This is essentially a pricing problem.
Here's a quote from the original 1968 paper that used the term
There are two common solutions to this kind of problem. Regulate use of the common resource or sell it. Because of the structure of the internet, it is hard to fairly price bandwidth and no good regulatory scheme has developed, so I don't see any other answer than living with it.
I like my beverages with warning labels!
Within 5 years networks connected to the internet will have to undergo a router emissions test to check for worthless and broken packets. If the level is too high they will be required to have their routers/servers/workstations repaired within 30 days or their connection to the net will be suspended.
Especially when concerning trivial matters such as electronic communication and the internet.
who is this michael?
So people, please take a number. One at a time, don't slashdot all at once.
My <1000 UID is with a hot chick
"Routers have many ways to decide. Sometimes they send out test packets and time them."
it isn't RIP, OSPF, EIGRP, or BGP. i don't know ISIS, but i strongly suspect these people are talking out of their asses.
If I had to rely on MY OWN goodwill I would be screwed!
Do your part tomorrow in protesting SchrubCo.'s War on Everything
Cheers,
W00t
Get Your War On Page 19
Wouldn't a decent implementation of QoS help this situation?
Instead of a router choosing the fasted or least-congested route for a packet, it could also factor in things like what type of packet/service it is.
NNTP, e-mail, and other non-interactive, non-realtime packets could be shunted down secondary pipes -- you'd never notice most of it anyway.
QoS on IPv4 doesn't really have the granularity for this, and it seems most routers on the 'net ignore those bits anyway.
I believe this was one of the things that IPv6 was supposed to address.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Here is how I think of the internet: the router somehow discovers which route is the quickest, and if it has data to send, it sends it via the quickest source. if that source becomes too congested, then obviously another method will arise to transfer the data, and that route will be used. so given that there is a set amount of bandwidth trying to be transfered, and a set amount of total bandwidth available for each connection, how is sending data through a slower connection going to help at all? thanks. PS: I read the article, its just that I have no clue what game theory is and how it applies to this.
I suspect it has something to do with the Emperor wearing no clothes. That being said, I'm an Imperialist!
Is that a reference to the panopticon (as in the idea for a prison/building) or am I confusing "references" and "values" ;-)
Really?
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
The Economists call this the "Tragedy of the Commons." Talk amongst yourselves.
There is no spoon or sig.
In many (but certainly not all), Internet traffic is similar to automobile traffic. Packets are discrete objects, like cars, and not continuous like a river or radio signal. Analysis on automobile traffic has already discovered properties like this. There are many simulations that show if we all ensured 3 car lengths between us and the next car, we would avoid the accordion and get to work significantly faster.
This article makes no sense from a proper real world routing perspective.
Any provider who is doing anything slightly serious will be using BGP4 routing for their EGP. It does NOT send out magic packets to find best paths. It learns routes from it's peers and will choose the best route based on a defined set of decisions. Routers do not keep a list of "neglected routes." If one route goes away, the router will simply pick the next best path.
Read more about BGP4 from Cisco's website. You will find little in common with this article and the one linked in the story.
Good routing relies on good admins with a well defined routing policy. There is no such thing as a "selfish" router.
Tim
The Tragedy of the Commons , often cited by environmentalists, describes 14th-century Britain, where each household tried to gain wealth by putting as many animals as possible on the common village pasture. Overgrazing ruined the pasture, and village after village collapsed.
The "tragedy of the commons" that Hardin's article is devoted to is increasing world population. What evidence is there for overgrazing in England before as opposed to during and after the forced transition to private ownership? Most cultures with a common land tradition also have a set of rules for governing land use that avoids such tragedies, for example, irrigation systems in Bali where the farmer who gets the water last controls the water flow. Ones that didn't solve the problem of overuse of resources are conspicuous by their non-existence (Easter Island, some settlements in the Southwest US, some populations on islands in the South Pacific ).
The 'tragedy of the commons' is one of the most misunderstood and overused metaphors of our times. The idea that a system with resources held in common is necessarily unworkable is false --- what is needed is institutions that effectively manage common resources, and such institutions have emerged repeatedly and continue to exist. Often it is when these cultures come into contact with market-oriented societies that the traditional systems are undermined and collapsed. Often what happens is not "the tragedy of the commons" but "the tragedy of failed privatization" in which a traditional management system is destroyed without establishing a viable alternative.
How does this relate to the internet? It's a cautionary tale --- be very very careful when introducing monetary incentives into a system that has previously relied on cooperation and cultural norms.
blog-O-rama
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
The problem is not that service providers pick the route that gets the packet to its destination quickest; it's that they pick the route that gets the packet off their network the fastest. Those two are not the same thing at all. Think about it geographically. Let's say I'm a square network and I receive a packet at the northern end of my western border destined for somewhere to my northeast. I know that the quickest way to get it to its destination is to move it east across my own network and deliver it to my eastern neighbor. However, I also know that if I pass it on to my northern neighbor it will still get there without coming to me again, and my northern neighbor is closer. So, if I'm a selfish bastard, what do I do? I ship it northward, minimizing the time that it spends on my own network but increasing the total time before it reaches its destination. If everyone does this same sort of "hot potato" routing, total load on the network increases for everyone. In fact, my northern neighbor might very well be doing the same for packets lying to our southwest. We'd both be better off if we'd "play nice" but since we're both trying to be selfish we both lose.
Yes, folks, it's an instance of the prisoners' dilemma and these researchers are not the first to notice the fact.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Michael is this paranoid and egotistical fucker.
First thought: What do oysters have to do with internet?
Second thought: OOPS! SELfish...
Third thought: ??????
Fourth thought: Profit!
Basically if everyone acts unselfishly they do better. But from each individuals perspective they do better when they act selfish, so it all falls apart. Its interesting stuff and the prisoners dilema game algorithms are interesting.
Prisoners Dilema
Play the dilema game online
This comes from a PhD dissertation that can be found here (its a pdf). Looks interesting, if a bit long.
This article did not differentiate between the two. Perhaps a strategy that night optimize one of them would pessemize the other.
Lansing, J. S. (1991) "Priests and Programmers: Technologies of power in the engineered landscape of Bali ", Princeton: Princeton University Press. Leviatan, U., H. Oliver, J. Quarter (1998)
blog-O-rama
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
But what is the "selfish" object? The individual network administrator or some larger body, such as a college or business?
What is the gene, and what is the gene's machine?
In the Spock case, the Starfleet is the selfish body benefitting by the "altruism". Spock is merely an automaton carrying out the selfish wishes of the organization. If he is benefitting his "genes", then his death is immaterial. Look at cooperative family behaviors.
Of course there is no physical gene in Spock's case, but perhaps the idea of a Starfleet is the meme that survives because of Spock's behavior.
GF.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
I'm confused too. The article states that computers test the routes, and pick the least congested route to use. Thus, it slows everything down for everyone.
What should it do? Pick the MOST congested route? Either I'm just confused, the author didn't understand the situation correctly, or the whole thing is BS.
Thank you. I was sitting there reading it, thinking "this sounds like a load of shit. Either I am a blithering idiot (entirely possible) or this article is worthless."
Its sounds like a purely acedemic exercise that is being underwritten by someone with too much money, that has NO practical application.
Glad to know I'm not alone in the confusion.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Messing with routing seems to be the same as the DOT messing with shuffling cars and metering lights. Instead of focusing on how we can change all these routing patterns, why don't we just "build more roads"? I realize it isn't exactly trivial to do that, and that the backbones might be pretty tough, but what about all that "dark fiber" that is supposedly just laying around? That's the equivalent of not using an open freeway in a major city during rush hour! We've already got the road, but we just don't use it.
Wouldn't doing that just open up more bandwidth for people, at least locally?
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
To use a droll real-world example, consider the following:
The article is suggesting that if some people used alternate routes, then the primary routes wouldn't get overloaded and therefore would get more done.
In my town, back in the day, we had a total of 2 local ISPs whose nocs were less than a block apart. I worked at one and a friend at the other. we tried like hell to get the 2 companies to string some cat5 between the 2 buildings and ease the load on each of our T1's. They wouldn't do it, wouldn't even talk about it. So whenever I sent an email to one of my friends who subscribed to the other ISP, it got to travel out our T1, halfway across the country and back, and down their T1. Stupid.
G
Which nicely frames the (P2P,Buffet-style) vs ISP broadband battle nicely. Now who's the first to blink?
My life has taught me a complementary truth: if you don't have the goodwill of others, you're totally screwed.
If you rely on the goodwill of others, and demonstrate goodwill to them, your life will get better.
Who's going to pay for it, you? Remember part of the prisioners dilemma is the concept of selfishness. If it's selfishness that created the situation, then one can't depend on selfishness to alleviate it. Altruism can, but then altruism can keep the situation from arising to begin with. Now you see why it's called a "dilemma"
Actually, just think about it from a larger perspective. There are many independent routers out there, and they each decide how to route their traffic simultaneously. Now, imagine that the least congested path (#1) is only slightly better than other potential paths. The problem is that _everyone makes the same decision_ and chooses this one path for their traffic. The result is congestion on the one popular path everyone chose. If that was the only effect, nobody would really care - but here's the catch : at the next time interval the same thing is likely to happen again! Everyone chooses #2 on the list, since #1 is now toast. They all crash into each other.
At the same time, I don't see how their suggestion really helps things that much. If everyone uses the same deterministic algorithm to choose a path, this sort of mass collision is still likely to happen (although it should happen less often with more complicated algorithms). I think that overall network performance would benefit from a little randomness in the routing algorithms. I'm not a CS, so there is probably already a random component that I don't know about.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Ipv6 supports better Qos so if the fastest route is congested the router can more easily find out and select an alternative route.
Internet2 has an extremely fast backbone and is based on Ipv6. This will help greatly since the backbone of the current internet can be quite congested at times. Lets hope its implemented soon as the current problem will likely go away.
http://saveie6.com/
I mean, the metrics a network uses to determine the best route are not at
all necessarily what is fastest, or what is closest..... it can be completely arbitrary.
Lowest latency, least used, least hops, least dollar cost, etc.
Some networks try to offload traffic to other networks as fast as possible. Others try to get data as close to the destination as possible before offloading it. In both cases, everything would work fine, if only everyone played by the same rules.
Cornell University scientists are not idiots. In fact they are competing for grant money.
If scientist would only take all grant money and divide it up equally amongst themselves, I might buy this thesis.
Open source development is my way of competing with the low-cost programmers in India...
even IF every router used the same algorithm, it would be based upon what is fastest FROM THAT ROUTER. They all would see the fastest as something else from their point. And they all don't use the same algorithm :)
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Ok, this has to be the most convoluted article I've ever read.. They're effectively saying, don't use the best route, pick another, because your extra traffic may break the best route.
:)
We diagramed a sample network here in the office, to try and explain what we just read to ourselves.. We picked 5 cities (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Miami), and drew direct routes between Miami, LA, and NY to each other. Chicago gets routes to NY and LA. Dallas gets routes to everything but Chicago.
We then contemplated what a packet from LA to NY would be looking at.
On our mythical network, we have the following ping times.
LA -> NY 20ms
LA -> Chicago -> NY 25ms
LA -> Dallas -> NY 40ms
LA -> Miami -> NY 60ms
So, we shoudn't be selfish, and take the LA->NY route? We should direct our traffic LA->Dallas->NY ? If this route is already slow or conjested, what good does that do? Now instead of using a perfectly good route, we're killing a conjected one.
If LA->NY is the best/fastest at the time, use it. If/when that becomes more conjested, it will no longer be the best choice, and the new best choice will be chosen..
Not everyone is going to be using YOUR best choice all the time.. Very doubtful that Miami will be routing to LA to go to NY. If they do, it's because Miami->LA is already overloaded. But as it usually works, For Miami->NY, there is already a second best choice (Miami->Dallas->NY).
No matter how we look at it, this doesn't make any sense.. Here's a sample of the lines for our example.
LA->NY OC192
LA->Chicago OC48
Chicago->NY OC48
LA->Dallas OC48
Dallas->NY OC24
So, we'll leave the LA->NY route empty, and keep dumping our load onto the lesser routes?
I do like the idea though, to keep the best choice (LA->NY) open for myself.. Everyone else chooses the second best route.. Go ahead and flood those OC48's, I'll use the OC192 that no one else uses..
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
of the main paper : http://www.cs.cornell.edu/timr/papers/indep_full.p df and others.
:P
1. Their basic idea is to model decentralized routing as a Nash game and then worst-case compare the performance of this game with the best achievable by ANY algorithm, decentralized or not. This sort of comparison is common in the field of competitive analysis .
2. Assuming a hop latency to increase linearly with additional traffic on it, selfish routing causes the average packet latency to increase by no more than 4/3 of that caused by ideal optimal routing. This worst-case figure had been earlier called "the Price of Anarchy" by Papadimitriou, a famous researcher in algorithmic complexity who every CS student loves to hate
3. Similar Prices of Anarchy have been derived by them for when the hop latency increases nonlinearly with the additional traffic on it.
4. The worst case is always achievable with a simple network of 2 nodes connected by parallel links. This is the exactly the example used in networking courses and textbooks to illustrate the oscillation problem caused by selfish routing. This paper says that using this simple network as example is justified since the worst case can be always be analysed with it.
5. Instead of optimizing routing to try reach the minimum possible average latency, you can keep the routing selfish but double each link capacity and achieve the same result.
I think the application this research might be in highly private networks like those built on top of Cable TV systems...
/. or google to take the slowest route so that the VOD of American Idol or Joe Hacker make it to more homes in your 'hood.' Etc., etc., etc.
In the future most if not all digital cable will be transmitted via IP including VOD -- Video On Demand.
Every at 8pm will want the their own movie and the network will need some type of active yield managment. Pricing will be one way (it might cost more at 8pm than at 1am, etc.)
However If selfish networks are 1.33 to 1.66 times slower than ideal, the wasted speed would be critical to the private network i'm talking about.
They might want your data coming and going from
http://www.hawknest.com/
1. Choose the nth least congested path, where n is the statistical "sweet spot".
2. Add randomness, so that your actual choices oscillate around n.
3. Include logic to keep your random deviations from getting too far from n, where "too far" is "unacceptably sucky".
4. For great justice!!!
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Actually this makes sense if you think about it, society works much in this way. If we help each other then everyone wins. If we each selfishly try to do everything to only our own benefit, then we all loose. Also if you think about it, true criminals are completely selfish. ;)
.. they do cause problems for server admins.
I have an FTP server with big files everyone wants. That means that most of the downloaders use download managers that connect with at average 5-7 connections / file. (I have seen an advert for a manager that uses 20 connections!)
These people normally don't even have a fat pipe to fill their downloads with. If they did, one connection would really be enough for them. Many of them are using modems! That means that bandwidth is not a problem.
Problem is that if I'm supposed to sustain a relatively good speed and not create too many processes to eat system resources, I'm going to limit maximum connections to some limit.
If I use limit of 100 users, each of them is going to get 1% of my bandwidth. Wrong. If I get 5 of those, who use 20 connections, I'm out of download slots. With some bad luck, these are all modem users that download with their 4kB/s for a long time.. until they finish their downloads and maybe with some luck, someone with a decent connection can have their turn.
With 5 downloads / user, that makes about 20 real clients. With modem users that makes about 80kB/s total traffic instead of 10 kB/s for 100 clients at average (saturated 10mbps connection).
So.. should the servers support minimum of 10 kB/s sustained traffic for 100 people or hope that all people use download managers and up the limit 5-20x to 500-2000 clients and hope that people don't really try to use better connections to download anything, because all of them are going to get is only 0,5 kB/s / connection anyway?
I don't think that's going to make downloads any faster.
Are they going to make people not choose the best route like the cops in NJ pull you over for driving in the left lane?
--
Power to the Peaceful
- the other party tends to reciprocate, making the interaction civil and therefore less stressful
- often, the other party is so pleased to encounter someone who extends a bit of courtesy that he or she will perform services not usually rendered (oh, here, let me take care of that for you -- it's no problem -- have a great day!)
- it shortens unwanted interactions. If you want to talk to me and I don't particularly want to talk to you (typical for telemarketers for instance), then if I'm polite and clear you'll finish the transaction quickly. But if I'm rude, the transaction takes longer to complete and may be reinitiated multiple times.
Courtesy -- it's not just for dates.Oh, go on, check out my job.
even more relevant...remember this? [giveboobs.com]
I remember seeing the give boobs when she only had $25, wow. I am always scared those are just people who want money, and think of some way to get it from people. It is still very nice that people on the internet can still have good will at times. As long as they give somthing back after taking so much, especailly the person with $20k debt.
The common good before self interest.
Hmm, seems we have here another crappy /. article. Some Phd student has some pdfs about optimal routing and a news source writes about it. The problem is the news article completly fails to make sense. The pdfs are buried under the /. effect, but the news article describe a problem that DOESN'T HAPPEN IN ANY network built in the last 10 years.
How do I become an editer? At least I can idenfity pesduo science.
If there's anything the Internet has taught me. is that Mr. George Hull (not P.T. Barnum) was right.
Jim Harry
Jeepers, always such high quality thinking going on at Valentine's! And just about any other arbitrarily important date, I suppose. Here's an interesting article from the Guardian about the science that gets press on this day of love.
Is unfortunate proof that altruism breaks down on a large scale. This is the fundamental flaw of socialism - humans evolved from simian ancestors, who basically lived in small tribal groups. We are altruistic up to a maximum of about 75 or so individuals, then it breaks down.
I have seen videotape of a psychology experiment, where an individual feigned a serious medical problem and keeled over in the middle of the street. When the test subject tried this on a busy urban thoroughfare, large passing crowds actually stepped over the guy. But in a small village, shopkeepers rushed out onto the street to try and help him.
There was a famous murder case in NYC where over 100 neighbours heard a woman begging for help as she was having her life snuffed out over a sadistic killer over a period of time. Nobody reported it or tried to intervene, they all assumed somebody else would do something about it. This resulted in the passage of a law, which as I recall was the subject of the final Seinfeld episode.
My rights don't need management.
Good.. I was thinking we're idiots too.. Either that, or I need to start routing all my traffic down the most conjested pipes to watch it go faster. :)
n g
I've worked with our provider a bit with routing. We have mirrored servers in colo's around the country. If one city is conjested, we move traffic *AWAY* from the conjestion. Usually our traffic makes a difference for everyone else. I can have 500Mb/s added or removed from any given city within an hour, without flinching. Of course, before I do something like that, I put in a call first.. "Hey, can this city take 500Mb/s right now?"
We wrote a program to take traceroutes from all the cities to various points, and plot them all onto a big network map, with ping times and the like.. We know which cities, peerings, or lines have problems at a glance..
http://www.voyeurweb.com/network.12.23.2002-11h.p
Warning: This picture is *BIG*. It's of our networks in Los Angeles, New York, Tampa, between each other, and to all of the root nameservers.. It makes a rather extensive map that is 11580x2669. It won't fit on your screen. Save it, and take it into your favorite image editing software to view it..
This map is a little old (Dec 23, 2002 at 11am), but it gives a good impression of what the networks immediately around our servers looked like, and how they interact with each other.. Shitty networks stand out in red.. I definately wouldn't want to MORE of my traffic that way. Sometimes we don't have a choice. If your ISP uses a shitty provider, we have to send it that way..
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
It's a mistake to posit altruism and the market as the only alternative institutions --- the Balinese example does not rely on altruism, it's consistent with a game theoretic model with rational actors.
As to the benefits of introducing market-mechanisms into the internet, I would pose the following question: how many viruses, worms, etc. would we expect to see released in an environment where there was a potential monetary payoff for such actions?
Enron made a huge mess of the electricity markets in California, partly through fraud and deceit, but mainly because the people who designed the rules of the market didn't think the problem through. Let's not repeat that mistake with the Internet based on some theoretical ideas about the efficiency of markets.
blog-O-rama
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
Okay, so tell me: what is the difference between a Taoist and an enlightened Machiavellian?
Does it matter if someone consistently does something altruistic for selfish or selfless reasons? The outcome is the same.
If you really want to get into the motives, then why not just say that acting in the best interest of the commons is itself "selfish" because it is a safer strategy for a better outcome. Sure, you can play the short-term selfish game and come out ahead (maybe), but you will be surrounded by people who resent your success. The lesson in competition is not "improve performance" but rather "sabotage your competition".
Altruism is the reverse: by supporting your "competition" (called "complimentors" in the newspeak) you may risk losing an advantage (as in the prisoner's dilemma) in the short term, but by employing simple strategies like "tit-for-tat" in an environment that is biased towards altruism will eventually lead to maximal outcomes for the population taken as a whole (the "rising tide floats all boats" analogy, here properly applied, for once). It really is inevitable, because the feedback of the "game" allows the participants to learn what will work best for them.
In a human social context, you would hope that that learning would move from the purely intellectual to the personal. If you can learn to do good for selfish reasons, it might occur to you that doing good has value in and of itself.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Altruism is not the way we keep air and water clean. Air and water quality are public goods (in the economics sense of the term), and keeping them clean is a collective action problem. It's straightforward game theory to show that the rational choice, in a system where you have no reason to trust people, is to make sure you don't get screwed before you have a chance to "get yours".
The way people and governments get out of a collective action problem (like an arms race, or like EMU monetary/fiscal policy, etc) is not through altruism, but through formal cooperation. In order to ensure that everyone cooperates, you need to (1) clearly define what constitutes cooperation, (2) make it transparent (obvious) who is cooperating and who is not, and (3) decide on mechanisms for enforcement.
-- jbl
A quick traceroute to yahoo from my Cornell Resnet connection shows that we do in fact have an OC-3 connection to the Internet. The connection to Internet 2 is probably many times faster.
if I could.
I think whoever wrote this article is far removed from the real world. They are finding theoretical problems with the routing protocols we would like to be running. As you pointed out, pretty much the entire backbone is using BGP4 to make routing decisions. And BGP4 doesn't really have any measure of how congested links are, nor how long the latency is. The basic measure of BGP4 is how many different providers (called AS's or Autonomous Systems) a packet might have to traverse.
Hmmm, the router says, is the best route thru C&W->AT&T->Bob's_ISP or just Level3->Bob's_ISP? I'll pick the two hop route. Sure, we all do some manual tuning, where the engineer says "I know the L3->Bob link is slow, so I'll make it look like L3->L3->Bob", but BGP4 is fundamentally a really stupid protocol. In theory. In practice, it works fine almost all of the time.
The most telling quote from the article is this:
They also found that doubling the capacity of the system would provide the same benefits as a managed system.
No shit Sherlock. I could've told you that five years ago. Why do you think QoS is still facing an uphill struggle? It's far cheaper and easier to just keep cranking up the bandwidth than to replace BGP4 with something smarter, or to deploy QoS protocols Internet wide.
Don't get me wrong, I think they are doing great research. It's good to try and figure out what might go wrong with next-gen protocols before the get deployed. But I don't think they are talking about problems on todays Internet.
On the opposite of Internap are the big carriers who don't allow peering but charge everyone. Selfish? Maybe, but they sunk in the capital.
High above Cayuga's waters
There's an awful smell.
Maybe it's Cayuga's waters
Maybe it's Cornell.
From the FAQ on this site:
It's like the bootleg CD theory. They are all over Manhattan, but you just shouldn't buy them. Because if you buy them, then you'll run up the cost of CDs in the future. It's like stealing. Someone's gonna pay, and it will be the consumer.
Looks like the RIAA should have paid all her debt just for this one...
There's also a story about this at CNET.
Maybe I got that wrong, but aren't all the routers they're talking about using BGP to decide their routes?
So don't they decide which is the best link based on AS length and load balance if the length is equal on multiple links?
How can this article be true if basically the admins and the architecture of the net determine a route and not the router itself?
AFAIK no normal backbone router decides the best path based on some obscure metrics.
I think the analogous constraint for routers would be "don't send so many bits."
Maybe I did not understand the article but chances are that maybe i did!
For distributed routing every router takes its own decision. SPF is used. Assume OSPF now. Routers
basically set weights on its interfaces/ports. There are two types of weights: static and dynamic.For static weights there is nothing much a router can do except obey (a lazy) administrator's decision.Dynamic weight setting gives a router some freedom. It may set its interface weights depending upon the available bandwidth. It could even penalize congestion by choosing very high weights for loads more than say 95% of the link capacity.
But there is a small problem commonly known as "osciallation". Consider two links A and B connected to a router. Router finds out that A is congested so it sets a high weight on interface A. This leads to shift of traffic from link A to link B. At some point link B will become loaded. Now the router sets interface B weight high.
Question: where will the traffic of link B go now? Right. To link A!! This is oscillation.
MPLE/IP:
In MPLS/IP networks it is possible to do load balancing based on the utilization of the links. The traffic being virtual-circuit would use the same path for the duration of its existance as LSP. No unnecessary oscillations here.
Offline Weight Optimization:
Bandwidth is the resource. Customers produce demand. The objective function, for example, could be to minimize Maximum Link Utilization. There are some constraints, for example, total demand will not exceed the link capacity, etc etc. How this global (entire network) optimization problem is solved is not a big deal, the big deal, however, is the result. The solution provides a set of weights which when set on the interfaces leads to a load-balanced and better utilized network.
Point : Humans maybe greedy but mathematics is generous!
Voltaire: God is dead.
God: Voltaire is dead!
The effect on Slammer is still being felt through routers being compromised, and its weeks later. A serious router exploit could cause some major roadblocks on the information superhighway.
Do you need a website upgrade?
What you're really relying on is the selfishness of the hardware. If the hardware itself did something different, then the people that bought them would live with that. Case in point is ethernet devices.
Each of these has an altruistic collision avoidance method: when a collision happens, stop sending and wait a random amount of time before sending again. A selfish ethernet device would always immediately attempt to send under the assumption that the other device would be waiting, and it would get to go first. But of course, that's very bad for the network, so it's not done.
The fact that we've got selfish routers is not a sign that they're selfish, per se, but that selfish routing is somewhere near the most effective a means of communication that they could think of at the time when they where invented.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Altruism is a code of ethics which hold the welfare of others as the standard of "good", and self-sacrifice as the only moral action. The unstated premise of the doctrine of altruism is that all relationships among men involve sacrifice. This leaves one with the false choice between maliciously exploiting the other person (forcing them to be sacrificed) or being "moral" and offering oneself up as the sacrificial victim. Why is the second considered good? Apparently because Jesus said so.
But the dichotomy of sacrifice or exploit is false. Between rational people, there should never be any sacrifice involved nor conflict of interest. The true moral interaction between two people should be an interaction as traders - trading value for value in a mutually agreed on and beneficial manner.
This is not to say that benevolence and good will are immoral. It is only sacrifice that is immoral, and being generally benevolent is not a sacrifice but a benefit and a virtue. The difference is that to be "good" according to Altruism, one must hand out blank checks to all who claim a need; while according to Egoism, ones own life is one's ultimate standard of value against which all acts must be analyzed.
--Importance of Philosophy.com
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
My reaction to this story is 'well, duh'. If it costs you nothing extra, of course you will choose a route for your traffic without considering the effects on others. It's like the classic analogy of a train seat which has room enough for two: a third passenger coming along is likely to squeeze onto the end of the seat, squashing the other two, because *for him* it is better than standing.
The answer is for routing costs to accurately reflect the contention for resources. If a particular route gets crowded, charge slightly more for sending packets down it. Routers can negotiate in real time to set prices and find the cheapest route for their data. Quality of service guarantees can be implemented by purchasing bandwidth (or options to use bandwidth) in advance.
You won't eliminate selfish behaviour, the way to keep things running smoothly is to make sure people pay for the cost of the resources they use (and no more). Then it will be in their own interests to consider the effect on others, and to avoid overusing already congested routes.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Are you quite sure that issues such as a whole network of routers constantly jumping from one route to another (and back again) is something that you'll often find in the real world these days?
Further, while you'd like to see more randomness in routing, I'd like to see more work put into correct path selection.
I don't think the author of the article was right to make the alleged issues with routing algorithms look like "selfishness" amongst (presumably) network administrators.
The point that the author briefly touched on regarding a routing algorithm to take into regard the effect of adding extra load onto a particular network path was interesting but I don't really see the point. For example, OSPF (Dijkstra algorithm) will know that a 10Mb link at 50% capacity is a more attractive option compared to a 2Mb link at 0% capacity (or a 100Mb link at 98% capacity). Calculating what would happen to the network after your, say, 1Mb of capacity requirements are loaded onto a paticular path seems largely useless as the most attractive route is already going to be selected... Feel free to enlighten me on this.
If every router picks the "fastest" route based on ping, then shouldn't the internet be operating at the fastest speed possible? If the "fastest" routes are already being used by the routers, then, technically, there will be nothing faster. The way I see it, its not like the routers all choose the same router just because it is "better" (like a driver might choose a highway), but which ever route gets the packet there the fastest. I would think it would automatically choose some routes with less traffic, not just the high-bandwidth/high-traffic ones. Besides, when I boot up CounterStrike, I would be pretty upset if some random internet router decided to send my packets around the world 3 times before they get to their destination just because it would be "better for the internet as a whole". :-P
SIGFAULT
Apparently, moderators don't know what
;-) (wink wink, nudge nudge)
;-)
j/k (just kidding)
means...
I didn't even mention the B-word!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Does the phrase "Tragedy of the commons" ring a bell?
We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as
supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type
programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close
communication.
-- Dennis Ritchie
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