A microscopic description of packet transport in the Internet by using a simple cellular automaton model is presented. A generalised exclusion process is introduced which allows to study travel times of the particles (‘data packets’) along a fixed path in the network. Computer simulations...

We investigate the totally asymmetrical simple exclusion process (TASEP) in the presence of a bottleneck, i.e. a sequence of consecutive defect sites with reduced hopping rate. The influence of such a bottleneck on the phase diagram is studied by computer simulations and a novel analytical...