'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."

Comments

Re:I'm confused

[zackbar]

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.

Use Poor Routing - Better Performance?

[JWSmythe]

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.. :)

The existance of so much spam

[earthforce_1]

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.