2 Mind Your Own Bandwidth

The growing popularity of the Internet, and particularly streaming and cloud services like Dropbox and Netflix, has caused a dramatic increase in data usage since 2010 [1]. Internet service providers (ISPs) are thus confronting a difficult question: how should they cope with this growing demand for data as it threatens to overwhelm their available network capacity?An obvious answer to this question would be to simply expand network capacity to meet users’ demands. However, demand for data is growing at such a fast rate that the necessary capacity increases and would require prohibitive amounts of investment [2]. Thus, instead of expanding the bandwidth supply, many ISPs have turned to managing user demand. By limiting bandwidth demand at any given time to lie below the network capacity threshold, ISPs can prevent their networks from becoming over-congested. However, demand restriction is not easy …