Selfish routing

Sun Apr 27 02:53:19 UTC 2003

Stephen Sprunk wrote:
> Thus spake "Mike Lloyd" <drmike at routescience.com>
>>Roughgarden's work generally seems to get reported on
>>backwards.  What's a poor journalist to do?
> 
> Learn how to present his ideas?

Perhaps I was overly diplomatic in wording the joke :-)  It seems likely 
to me that Roughgarden encourages the misreading.  But I have a hard 
time blaming him for that; what harm was done in this case by 
emphasizing the "newsworthy" spin of this result?  We wouldn't be 
talking about his interesting work if he'd tried to get the interest of 
the NYT with "hey, selfish routing is almost as good as perfect routing!"

> Selfish routing is the simplest and cheapest to implement, which are large
> factors in evaluating the "best" dumb network.

Simpler than a God of TE in the middle of the network, but not simplest. 
  What we have today is about the simplest, and it's not what 
Roughgarden means by "selfish" routing.  He assumes routing which 
promptly responds to congestion-induced latency, and that is not 
automated in much of the Internet today.  It's also not simple to 
implement correctly.

The technology is available, and a perennial question (which Sean 
Donelan referred to at least obliquely at the start of this thread) is 
whether it's better to use smarter routing decisions, to add more 
bandwidth, or to just leave things as they are.  Since we're awash in 
bandwidth we can't find enough uses for, and some users remain 
dissatisfied, it's nice to see academic results that suggest option one 
is (theoretically) effective.

Mike