Congestion control in utility fair networks

This paper deals with a congestion control framework for elastic and real-time traffic, where the user's application is associated with a utility function. We allow users to have concave as well as non-concave utility functions, and aim at allocating bandwidth such that utility values are shared fairly. To achieve this, we transform all utilities into strictly concave second order utilities and interpret the resource allocation problem as the global optimization problem of maximizing aggregate second order utility. We propose a new fairness criterion, utility proportional fairness, which is characterized by the unique solution to this problem. Our fairness criterion incorporates utility max-min fairness as a limiting case. Based on our analysis, we obtain congestion control laws at links and sources that (i) are linearly stable regardless of the network topology, provided that a bound on round-trip-times is known, (ii) provide a utility proportional fair resource allocation in eq...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: CN
• Authors: Tobias Harks, Tobias Poschwatta
• Keywords: CN 2008, Fair Resource Allocations, Resource Allocations, Utility Functions