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Given the technical flaws with—and the increasing non-observance of—the TCP-friendliness paradigm, we must rethink how the Inter- net should manage bandwidth allocation. We explore this question from first principles, but remain within the constraints of the In- ternet’s current architecture and commercial arrangements. We propose a new framework, Recursive Congestion Shares (RCS), that provides bandwidth allocations independent of which congestion control algorithms flows use but consistent with the Internet’s eco- nomics. We show that RCS achieves this goal using game-theoretic calculations and simulations as well as network emulation. 

A single homogeneous resource needs to be fairly shared between users that dynamically arrive and depart over time. Although good allocations exist for any fixed number of users, implementing these allocations dynamically is impractical: it typically entails adjustments in the allocation of every user in the system whenever a new user arrives. We introduce a dynamic fair resource division problem in which there is a limit on the number of users that can be disrupted when a new user arrives and study the trade-off between fairness and the number of allowed disruptions, using a fairness metric: the fairness ratio. We almost completely characterize this trade-off and give an algorithm for obtaining the optimal fairness for any number of allowed disruptions. 

A cache memory unit needs to be shared among n strategic agents. Each agent has different preferences over the files to be brought into memory. The goal is to design a mechanism that elicits these preferences in a truthful manner and outputs a fair and efficient memory allocation. A trivially truthful and fair solution would isolate each agent to a 1/n fraction of the memory. However, this could be very inefficient if the agents have similar preferences and, thus, there is room for cooperation. On the other hand, if the agents are not isolated, unless the mechanism is carefully designed, they have incentives to misreport their preferences and free ride on the files that others bring into memory. In this paper we explore the power and limitations of truthful mechanisms in this setting.We demonstrate that mechanisms blocking agents from accessing parts of the memory can achieve improved efficiency guarantees, despite the inherent inefficiencies of blocking.