UC Santa Barbara

The Internet has become a vital and essential part of modern everyday life. Services delivered by the Internet are used by people across the planet every moment of every day of the year. The Internet has proven a positive force for good improving the lives of billions of people worldwide. The power of the Internet to deliver this positive good to humanity relies on its ability to deliver life improving services. In my doctorate work culminating in this dissertation I have striven to sustain and increase the Internet's ability to deliver these services and to have a positive good effect upon humanity.

The overarching purpose of this dissertation is to improve the Internet's ability to deliver life improving services. I have further divided this purpose into two goals. To improve the ability of applications operating in challenging network conditions to gain their fair share of the bandwidth resources and to reduce the delay with which these services are delivered. Every service delivered by the Internet consists of Internet objects that are delivered through communication paths across the Internet. The delivery of these objects is defined by the two characteristics; Throughput and delay. Throughput determines how much of an object can be delivered over a period of time and delay determines how long it takes to deliver an object.

These two characteristics determine the Internet's ability to deliver objects across communication paths. Improving these two characteristics (bandwidth and delay) increase the ability of the Internet to deliver objects and thus improve the Internet's capability to deliver life improving services. To accomplish this goal I present projects along three areas of effort. These three areas of effort are: (1) Increase the ability of applications operating in challenging conditions to achieve their fair share of bandwidth. (2) Synthesize knowledge required to address the effort to reduce delay. (3) Develop protocols that reduce delay encountered in the communications paths of the Internet.

In this dissertation I present projects along these three areas of effort that accomplish the two goals (increase bandwidth and reduce delay) to achieve the purpose of improving the Internet's ability to deliver essential and life improving services. These projects and their organization into areas of effort, goals and purpose are my contributions to the networking sciences.