An Economical Cost Model for Fair Resource Sharing in Virtual Home Environments

Home networks recently gain importance due to their development from pure internal networks in form of an Ethernet LAN to converged networks integrating home, Internet, and access provider infrastructure. In emerging future home networking scenarios, service provisioning and network management is proposed by distributed architectures forming virtual home environments (VHEs). This paper provides a service description and corresponding traffic and cost model for fair resource sharing in VHEs. The objective of the proposed cost model is to allow an evaluation of the contribution and consumption for each user participating in the VHE to find an economic balance in the distributed behavior. Hereby, the contribution counts positively and the consumption negatively. The economic balance controls the load balancing in the VHE and further limits the consumption of resources for users which over-pass a corresponding threshold of negative balance leading to an exclusion from the VHE, if the negative balance is not equilibrated over a mean- or long-time horizon.