Many of the busiest servers in the Internet consist of clusters of nodes that serve out data of heterogeneous types. At a given point in time, a user could be receiving multiple concurrent data streams, both real-time and nonreal-time, that originate at a single server node, multiple nodes in the same server cluster, or nodes in separate clusters. In this paper, we argue that significant perfor...

We consider the performance of a network like the Internet handling so-called elastic traffic where the rate of flows adjusts to fill available bandwidth. Realized throughput depends both on the way bandwidth is shared and on the random nature of traffic. We assume traffic consists of point to point transfers of individual documents of finite size arriving according to a Poisson process. Notabl...

In this work, we propose a new active queue management mechanism called MFQ (Multicast Fair Queuing) for multicast flows. MFQ is independent of the inter-multicast fairness policy and it interacts with a multicast bandwidth allocation module that can implement either a multicast fairness policy or a multicast pricing model and tries using a single FIFO queue to achieve the expected allocation w...

The issue of buffer sizing is rightly receiving increasing attention with the realization that the bandwidth delay product rule-ofthumb is becoming unsustainable as link capacity continues to grow. In the present paper we examine this issue from the light of our understanding of traffic characteristics and the performance of statistical bandwidth sharing. We demonstrate through simple analytica...

iii Acknowledgement I have been fortunate enough to have the help and support of a large number of people. I would especially like to thank my advisors Jonathan Walpole and Molly H. Shor, who have been extremely helpful in identifying my thesis topic, developing the ideas, publishing paper, construct the structure of this thesis, and for all other guidance throughout many years. I would also li...

The exponential increase in mobile data demand coupled with the rapid deployment of various wireless access technologies have led to the proliferation of multi-interface enabled devices. As a result, researchers focused on exploiting the available interfaces on such devices in both solitary and collaborative forms. Unfortunately, the proposed systems, that exploit these interfaces, face a formi...

Fair bandwidth sharing at routers has several advantages, including protection of well-behaved flows and possible simplification of endto-end congestion control mechanisms. Traditional mechanisms to achieve fair sharing (e.g., Weighted Fair Queueing, Flow Random Early Discard) require per-flow state to determine which packets to drop under congestion, and therefore are complex to implement at t...

We study a sequential auction for sharing a wireless resource (bandwidth or power) among competing transmitters. The resource is assumed to be managed by a spectrum broker (auctioneer), who collects bids and allocates discrete units of the resource via a sequential second-price auction. It is well known that a second price auction for a single indivisible good has an efficient dominant strategy...

In bandwidth-sharing networks, users of various classes require service from different subsets of shared resources simultaneously. These networks have been proposed to analyze the performance of wired and wireless networks. For general arrival and service processes, we give sufficient conditions in order to compare sample-path wise the workload and the number of users under different policies i...