To be fair or efficient or a bit of both

Introducing a new concept of (, )-fairness, which allows for a bounded fairness compromise, so that a source is allocated a rate neither less than 0 1, nor more than 1, times its fair share, this paper provides a framework to optimize efficiency (utilization, throughput or revenue) subject to fairness constraints in a general telecommunications network for an arbitrary fairness criterion and cost functions. We formulate a non-linear program (NLP) that finds the optimal bandwidth allocation by maximizing efficiency subject to (, )-fairness constraints. This leads to what we call an efficiency-fairness function, which shows the benefit in efficiency as a function of the extent to which fairness is compromised. To solve the NLP we use two algorithms. The first is a well known branch-and-bound-based algorithm called Lipschitz Global Optimization and the second is a recently developed algorithm called Algorithm for Global Optimization Problems (AGOP). We demonstrate the applicability ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: COR
• Authors: Moshe Zukerman, Musa Mammadov, Liansheng Tan, Iradj Ouveysi, Lachlan L. H. Andrew
• Keywords: Algorithm, Arbitrary Fairness Criterion, Bandwidth Allocation, COR 2008