Utility Proportional Fair Bandwidth Allocation: An Optimization Oriented Approach

In this paper, we present a novel approach to the congestion control and resource allocation problem of elastic and real-time traffic in telecommunication networks. With the concept of utility functions, where each source uses a utility function to evaluate the benefit from achieving a transmission rate, we interpret the resource allocation problem as a global optimization problem. The solution to this problem is characterized by a new fairness criterion, utility proportional fairness. We argue that it is an application level performance measure, i.e. the utility that should be shared fairly among users. As a result of our analysis, we obtain congestion control laws at links and sources that are globally stable and provide a utility proportional fair resource allocation in equilibrium. We show that a utility proportional fair resource allocation also ensures utility max-min fairness for all users sharing a single path in the network. As a special case of our framework, we incorporate utility max-min fairness for the entire network. To implement our approach, neither per-flow state at the routers nor explicit feedback beside ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) from the routers to the end-systems is required.