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Science 25 July 1997:
Vol. 277. no. 5325, pp. 535 - 537
DOI: 10.1126/science.277.5325.535
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Reports

Social Dilemmas and Internet Congestion

Bernardo A. Huberman, Rajan M. Lukose

Because the Internet is a public good and its numerous users are not charged in proportion to their use, it appears rational for individuals to consume bandwidth greedily while thinking that their actions have little effect on the overall performance of the Internet. Because every individual can reason this way, the whole Internet's performance can degrade considerably, which makes everyone worse off. An analysis of the congestions created by such dilemmas predicts that they are intermittent in nature with definite statistical properties leading to short-lived spikes in congestion. Internet latencies were measured over a wide range of conditions and locations and were found to confirm these predictions, thus providing a possible microscopic mechanism for the observed intermittent congestions of the Internet.

Dynamics of Computation Group, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA.

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