User-Centric Network Fairness through Connection-Level Control

Methods for network resource allocation have mainly focused on establishing fairness among the rates of individual flows. However, since multiple TCP connections in one or many paths can serve a common user, we advocate in this paper a user-centric notion of fairness, which we formulate in the Network Utility Maximization (NUM) framework. In particular, we develop control laws for the number of connections identified with a certain user, which can include single-path, multipath or more general aggregates of flows, and prove convergence to the optimal resource allocation. This theory applies directly to the case of cooperative users. In the case where connections are generated exogenously by possibly non-cooperative users, we develop admission control policies that ensure both network stability and user-centric fairness.