ALCOMFT-TR-01-16

Alain Dupuis, Fabrice Guillemin and Philippe Robert
Modeling Max-Min Fairness for Elastic Flows in Telecommunication Networks
INRIA. Work package 2. February 2001.

Abstract: An analytical model is developed in this paper to study max-min fairnes s in telecommunication networks. Max-min fairness is a popular bandwidt h sharing principle, which is used to allocate bandwidth to elastic flo ws sharing the capacity of of the transmission links of a network. The model considered in the present paper is a linear single network link, on which originating points of data flows appear as a Poisson process; the length of a data is exponential with unit mean and the link transmi ssion capacity is taken as unity. While the definition of the max-min f air share is algorithmically clear, any analytical computation rapidly proves intractable. To overcome this technical difficulty, we develop s imple heuristic approximations. It turns out that the obtained formulae yield a satisfactory approximation of the max-min fair share. These approximations prove less accurate when considering the amount of unuse d bandwidth due to max-min fairness.

Postscript file: ALCOMFT-TR-01-16.ps.gz (96 kb).