A Stochastic Analysis of Resource Sharing with Logarithmic Weights

The paper investigates the properties of a class of resource allocation algorithms for communication networks: if a node of this network has x requests to transmit, then it receives a fraction of the capacity proportional to log(1+x), the logarithm of its current load. A detailed fluid scaling analysis of such a network with two nodes is presented. It is shown that the interaction of several time scales plays an important role in the evolution of such a system, in particular its coordinates may live on very different time and space scales. As a consequence, the associated stochastic processes turn out to have unusual scaling behaviors. A heavy traffic limit theorem for the invariant distribution is also proved. Finally, we present a generalization to the resource sharing algorithm for which the log function is replaced by an increasing function. Possible generalizations of these results with J ≥ 2 nodes or with the function log replaced by another slowly increasing function are discussed.