Bottleneck Congestion: Differentiating the Coarse Charge

Multipath Congestion Control for Shared Bottleneck

Multipath transport protocols, which transmit data over multiple distinct paths in an end-to-end connection are introduced. However, they have a problem in terms of fairness. When the transmissions along several paths share the same bottleneck link, the multipath connection receives higher throughput than a competing regular TCP flow, because it executes congestion control per path with the sam...

Step Tolling with Bottleneck Queuing Congestion

In most dynamic traffic congestion models, congestion tolls must vary continuously over time to achieve the full optimum. This is also the case in Vickrey's (1969) ‘bottleneck model’. To date, the closest approximations of this ideal in practice have so-called ‘step tolls’, in which the toll takes on different values over discrete time intervals, but is constant within each interval. Given the ...

London’s Congestion Charge

On the Inefficiency of Equilibria in Linear Bottleneck Congestion Games

We study the inefficiency of equilibrium outcomes in bottleneck congestion games. These games model situations in which strategic players compete for a limited number of facilities. Each player allocates his weight to a (feasible) subset of the facilities with the goal to minimize the maximum (weight-dependent) latency that he experiences on any of these facilities. We derive upper and (asympto...

Traffic Accidents and the London Congestion Charge

In a rare effort to internalize congestion costs, London recently instituted charges for traveling by car to the central city during peak hours. Although the theoretical influence on the number and severity of traffic accidents is ambiguous, we show that the policy generated a substantial reduction in both accidents and fatalities in the charged area and hours. At the same time, the spatial, te...