  Congestion control in the current Internet is accomplished mainly by TCP/IP.
To understand the macroscopic network behavior that results from TCP/IP and
similar end-to-end protocols, one main analytic technique is to show that the
the protocol maximizes some global objective function of the network traffic.
Here we analyze a particular end-to-end, MIMD (multiplicative-increase,
multiplicative-decrease) protocol. We show that if all users of the network use
the protocol, and all connections last for at least logarithmically many
rounds, then the total weighted throughput (value of all packets received) is
near the maximum possible. Our analysis includes round-trip-times, and (in
contrast to most previous analyses) gives explicit convergence rates, allows
connections to start and stop, and allows capacities to change.
