Title: A Model for Analyzing the Interaction Between 
Bandwidth Demand and Supply

The Internet has performed admirably well in coping with an 
exponential growth in traffic volume. Much credit for this 
robustness goes to TCP's congestion control mechanisms. 
However, TCP only controls the flow in a connection, whereas 
the number of connections is controlled by users. Borrowing 
terminology from economics, TCP controls bandwidth supply 
while the user controls bandwidth demand, and their 
equilibrium determines the network state.

There is already a huge literature on modeling bandwidth 
supply, but very little has been done for bandwidth demand. 
This talk models separately this supply and demand, and use 
them to analyze the interaction between network and user 
behavior, and their complementary roles in Internet 
congestion.

(This is work in progress, done in collaboration with Robert 
Morris.)