Bandwidth sharing: the role of user impatience

Empirical work has shown that up to 20% of the volume transferred on data networks might correspond to ‘aborted’ connections, i.e., badput. With this in mind, we propose two generic models that capture a variety of user impatience behaviors, and investigate their impact on user perceived and system performance achieved by various bandwidth sharing schemes. Our study suggests that differentiating bandwidth allocation based on job size, rather than using traditional fair share allocations, results in a more ‘graceful’ performance degradation, and particularly in the presence of impatient users, leads to better network efficiency as well as user perceived performance.