Exponential Scarcity: Metric for Fair Resource Distribution

Abstract – In online multimedia systems resources (e.g. network capacity) are to be evenly distributed among clients. These clients, however, usually have different QoS needs, and thus their actual capacity demands may vary considerably. In such context even distribution is not possible, but fair distribution, based on subjective client satisfaction must be achived instead. In this paper a new metric, exponential scarcity, is proposed, that’s based on clients’ subjective quality experience. It is shown, that a resource distirbution, where this metric is minimal leads to a balanced subjective satisfaction of the clients. As a corollary, the ideal scaling of QoS variations of multimedia content is proposed.