This thesis addresses a problem at the nexus of engineering, computer science, and economics: in large scale, decentralized systems, how can we efficiently allocate scarce resources among competing interests? On one hand, constraints are imposed on the system designer by the inherent architecture of any large scale system. These constraints are counterbalanced by the need to design mechanisms t...

In this report, we summarize the paper by Ramesh Johari and John Tsitsiklis [1]. This paper considers the problem of distributed resource allocation mechanisms for the Internet. The current Internet is used widely by a heterogenous population of users. Different users place different values on the perceived network performance. Moreover there are some fundamental constraints on the maximum rate...

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We consider a class of well-known dynamic resource allocation models in loss network systems with advanced reservation. The most important performance measure in any loss network system is to compute its blocking probability, i.e., the probability of an arriving customer in equilibrium finds a fully utilized system (thereby getting rejected by the system). In this paper, we derive upper bounds ...

Due to the emergence of the HTTP/1.1 standards, persistent connections are increasingly being used in web retrieval. This paper studies the caching performance of web clusters under persistent connections, focusing on the difference between session-grained and request-grained allocation strategies adopted by the web switch. It is shown that the content-based algorithm considerably improves cach...

Path diversity works by setting up multiple parallel connections between the end points using the topological path redundancy of the network. In this paper, Forward Error Correction (FEC) is applied across multiple independent paths to enhance the endto-end reliability. Internet paths are modeled as erasure Gilbert-Elliot channels [1], [2]. First, it is shown that over any erasure channel, Maxi...