One idea that came up in the paper we read this week really stuck with me, its not a new idea, I've heard it being talked about a lot in fact, its the idea of getting people to cooperate, in this case on the internet. For me, in my current area of research, that is a very interesting control problem. What incentives can we offer people in order to persuade them to cooperate together in an environment where cooperation isn't necessarily an inherent prospect.
In the example of the Internet, the problem that the researchers were looking at was the idea of trying to get UDP connections to share bandwidth fairly with TCP connections. An initial glance at this problem clearly shows that there does not exist any incentive for UDP to cooperate on the network, there is more incentive for the connections NOT to use congestion control at all. Why should they have to lose bandwidth? What benefit does that have for them? Th authors note that social incentives could play a factor, but are unquantifiable and not very trustworthy.
One suggestion that the authors made was creating router mechanisms that detect uncooperative flows and restricting their bandwidth. This penalizes flows for not conforming to congestion control. In looking toward my area of research, the idea of incentives to control a system seems very intriguing and I would like to read more research papers that focus on this idea in other applications.
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