Jacobson's TCP congestion control algorithm has been remarkably successful in regulating file transfers and facilitating the phenomenal growth of the Internet over the last decade. This congestion control mechanism was designed for networks where the required data rate per user is small (less than one Mbps) and the round-trip times are small (of the order of a few milliseconds). However, access speeds, application requirements and file transfer distances continue to increase. Therefore, it is necessary to redesign the congestion management mechanisms in the Internet to efficiently deliver high data rates over long distances, and to provide loss-free, delay-free service to the users of the Internet. In this talk, we will highlight the role of simple mathematical models in developing such scalable protocols for end hosts and routers in the Internet.

R. Srikant received his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1985, his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1988 and 1991, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. He was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1991 to 1995. He is currently with the University of Illinois, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Engineering and a Research Associate Professor in the Coordinated Science Lab. He was an associate editor of Automatica, and is currently on the editorial boards of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He was the chair of the 2002 IEEE Computer Communications Workshop in Santa Fe, NM. He received an NSF CAREER award in 1997. His research interests include communication networks, stochastic processes, queueing theory, information theory, control theory and game theory.