An emerging theoretical foundation for the Internet is outlined in the following draft articles :

• Robustness and the Internet : Design and Evolution
• Robustness and the Internet : Theoretical Foundations

The key ingredients of this theory are :

• Applications generate heavy tailed traffic, in which there is a natural decomposition into delay-sensitive mice and bandwidth-hogging elephants (which coexist rather badly in the current Internet). While most files (mice) have few packets, most packets are in large files (elephants).
  
• If properly exploited, heavy-tailed traffic is ideal for efficient and reliable transport over packet-switched networks, with proper protocol design.

• On the self-similar nature of Ethernet traffic
  W.E. Leland, M.S. Taqqu, W. Willinger, and D.V. Wilson, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 1994, vol. 2(1), pp. 1~15.
• Wide-Area Traffic: The Failure of Poisson Modeling
  Vern Paxson and Sally Floyd, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 3 No. 3, pp. 226-244, June 1995
• Self-similarity through high variability: statistical analysis of Ethernet LAN traffic at the source level
  W. Willinger, M.S. Taqqu, R. Sherman, and D.V. Wilson, in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking , 1997, vol. 5(1), pp. 71~86.
• Self-similarity in World Wide Web traffic: Evidence and possible causes
  M.E. Crovella and A. Bestavros, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking , 1997, vol. 5(6), pp. 835~846.
• Scaling phenomena in the Internet: Critically examining criticality
  Walter Willinger, Ramesh Govindan, Sugih Jamin, Vern Paxson, and Scott Shenker, PNAS 2002 99 Suppl. 1: 2573-2580

• Heavy Tails, Generalized Coding, and Optimal Web Layout
  Xiaoyun Zhu, Jie Yu and John Doyle, IEEE Inforcom, April 2001

• A Duality Model of TCP and Queue Management Algorithms
  S. H. Low, ITC Specialist Seminar on IP Traffic Measurement, Modeling and Management, September 18-20, 2000, Monterey, CA (USA)
• Understanding Vegas: A Duality Model
  S. H. Low, Larry Peterson and Limin Wang, Journal of ACM, 49(2):207-235, March 2002
• A Control Theoretic Analysis of RED
  C. Hollot, V. Misra, D. Towsley and W. B. Gong, IEEE Inforcom, April 2001.
• Dynamics of TCP/RED and a Scalable Control
  S. H. Low, F. Paganini, J. Wang, S. Adlakha and J. C. Doyle, IEEE Infocom, June 2002

• Scalable Laws for Stable Network Congestion Control
  Fernando Paganini, J. C. Doyle and S. H. Low, IEEE CDC, Orlando, FL, December 2001.
• A new TCP congestion control, with empty queues and scalable stability
  Fernando Paganini, Steven H. Low, Zhikui Wang, Sanjeewa Athuraliya and John C. Doyle, submitted for purblication, 2002.
• Robust congestion control for the Internet
  Glenn Vinnicombe, submitted for publication
• On the stability of networks operating TCP-like protocols
  Glenn Vinnicombe,  IFAC 2002.

• Rate control in communication networks: shadow prices, proportional fairness and stability
  F. P. Kelly, A.K. Maulloo and D. K. H. Tan, Journal of the Operational Research Society 49 (1998), 237-252.
• End-to-end congestion control for the Internet: delays and stability
  R. Johari and D. Tan, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 9(2001) 818-832.

• Frank Kelly's Self-managed Internet Page
• R. Srikant's Congestion Control and Pricing for a Heterogeneous Internet
• Steven Low's Networking Laboratory
  
• Glenn Vinnicombe's Internet page
• Barford's Heavy tailed traffic
• John Doyle's Complex networks page