On fair and efficient bandwidth allocation by the multiple target approach

Expanding demand on the Internet services leads to an increased role of the network dimensioning problem for elastic traffic where one needs to allocate bandwidth to maximize service flows and simultaneously to reach a fair treatment of all the elastic services. Thus, both the overall efficiency (throughput) and the fairness (equity) among various services are important. The max-min fairness (MMF) approach, widely used to this problem, guarantees fairness but may lead to significant losses in the overall throughput of the network. In this paper we show how the concepts of multiple criteria equitable optimization can be effectively used to generate various fair resource allocation schemes. We introduce a multiple target model equivalent to equitable optimization and we develop a corresponding procedure to generate fair efficient bandwidth allocations. The procedure is tested on a sample network dimensioning problem and its abilities to model various preferences are demonstrated.