What non-price mechanisms can be used for congestion control?
Administratively assigning different priorities to different types of traffic is appealing, but impractical as a long-run solution to congestion costs due to the usual inefficiencies of rationing. However, there is an even more severe technological problem: it is impossible to enforce. From the network’s perspective, bits are bits and there is no certain way to distinguish between different types of uses. By convention, most standard programs use a unique identifier that is included in the TCP header (called the “port” number); this is what NSFNET used for its priority scheme in 1987. However, it is a trivial matter to put a different port number into the packet headers; for example to assign the telnet number to ftp packets to defeat the 1987 priority scheme. To avoid this problem, NSFNET kept its prioritization mechanism secret, but that is hardly a long-run solution. What other mechanisms can be used to control congestion? The most obvious approach for economists is to charge some
Administratively assigning different priorities to different types of traffic is appealing, but impractical as a long-run solution to congestion costs due to the usual inefficiencies of rationing. However, there is an even more severe technological problem: it is impossible to enforce. From the network’s perspective, bits are bits and there is no certain way to distinguish between different types of uses. By convention, most standard programs use a unique identifier that is included in the TCP header (called the port number); this is what NSFNET used for its priority scheme in 1987. However, it is a trivial matter to put a different port number into the packet headers; for example to assign the telnet number to ftp packets to defeat the 1987 priority scheme. To avoid this problem, NSFNET kept its prioritization mechanism secret, but that is hardly a long-run solution. What other mechanisms can be used to control congestion? The most obvious approach for economists is to charge some sor
