Graham Cormode • Marina Thottan
Editors
c Springer-Verlag London Limited 2010
The Computer Communications and Networks series
Part I Network Design
Chapter 1
Design for Optimizability: Traffic Management of a Future Internet
Jiayue He, Jennifer Rexford, and Mung Chiang
Abstract
As networks grow in size and complexity, network management has
become an increasingly challenging task. Many protocols have tunable parameters,
and optimization is the process of setting these parameters to optimize an objective.
In recent years, optimization techniques have been widely applied to network management problems, albeit with mixed success. Realizing that optimization problems
in network management are induced by assumptions adopted in protocol design,
we argue that instead of optimizing existing protocols, protocols should be designed
with optimization in mind from the beginning. Using examples from our past
research on traffic management, we present principles that guide how changes to existing
protocols and architectures can lead to optimizable protocols.We also discuss
the trade-offs between making network optimization easier and the overhead these
changes impose.