Internet Failures: an Emergent Sea of Complex Systems and Critical Design Errors?

Abstract

Complex systems researchers have looked to the Internet as a possible source of interesting emergent behaviour. Indeed, some high-profile failures, and some low-level phenomena, might easily be construed as evidence of a complex system. In this paper, I look at the local and global consequences of the Internet design, and show that few, if any, of these problems are actually consequences of emergent properties in the pure technical sense. However, there are lessons for network architecture from these problems. The influence of local decisions on global behaviour of the network is a source of some of the difficulties that protocol designers must cope with, but it is also a source of great wealth and innovation, and as such should be regarded in a positive light.