Exploring Collective Dynamics in Communication Networks

A communication network, such as the Internet, comprises a complex system where cooperative phenomena may emerge from interactions among various traffic flows generated and forwarded by individual nodes. To identify and understand such phenomena, we model a network as a two-dimensional cellular automaton. We suspect such models can promote better understanding of the spatial-temporal evolution of network congestion, and other emergent phenomena in communication networks. To search the behavior space of the model, we study dynamic patterns arising from interactions among traffic flows routed across shared network nodes, as we employ various configurations of parameters and two different congestion-control algorithms. In this paper, we characterize correlation in congestion behavior within the model at different system sizes and time granularities. As expected, we find that long-range dependence (LRD) appears at some time granularities, and that for a given network size LRD decays as time granularity increases. As network size increases, we find that long-range dependence exists at larger time scales. To distinguish effects due to network size from effects due to collective phenomena, we compare congestion behavior within networks of selected sizes to congestion behavior within comparably sized sub-areas in a larger network. We find stronger long-range dependence for sub-areas within the larger network. This suggests the importance of modeling networks of sufficiently large size when studying the effects of collective dynamics.