This chapter begins with a discussion of the English common law, the basis for much of American law today, and its evolving role in regulating the cyberworld. The common law, based on case precedents, has proven to be very adept at resolving new and difficult problems, at times more quickly and competently than legislation. This same mechanism is being used today to solve problems to protect In...

Internet growth has allowed unprecedented widespread access to cultural creation including music and films, to knowledge, and to a wide range of consumer information. At the same time, it has become a huge source of business opportunities. Along with great benefits that this access to the Internet provides, the open and free access to the Internet has encountered large opposition based on polit...

One of the main bene...ts of multicast communication is the overall reduction of network load. To quantify this reduction, when compared to traditional unicast, experimental studies by Chuang and Sirbu indicated the so called power law which asserts that the number of links L(m) in a multicast delivery tree connecting a source to m (distinct) sites satis...es L(m) 1⁄4 cm where c is a constant. ...

High-speed communication networks are characterized by large bandwidth-delay products. This may have an adverse impact on the stability of closed-loop congestion control algorithms. In this paper, classical control theory and Smith's principle are proposed as key tools for designing an e!ective and simple congestion control law for high-speed data networks. Mathematical analysis shows that the ...

It is commonly believed that scale-free networks are robust to massive numbers of random node deletions. For example, Cohen et al. in (1) study scale-free networks including some which approximate the measured degree distribution of the Internet. Their results suggest that if each node in this network failed independently with probability 0.99, most of the remaining nodes would still be connect...

This thesis examines the scalability of multicast-based streaming delivery through analytical and empirical evaluation methodologies. Scalability is assessed with respect to two metrics: server bandwidth and network cost. The first metric quantifies the amount of server resources needed to serve a large number of concurrent clients. The second metric quantifies the amount of network resources n...