Utility max-min flow control using slope-restricted utility functions

We present a network architecture for the distributed utility max-min flow control of elastic and non-elastic flows where utility values of users (rather than data rates of users) are enforced to achieve max-min fairness. We provide a distributed link algorithm that does not use the information of users' utility functions. To show that the proposed algorithm can be stabilized not locally but globally, we found that the use of nonlinear control theory is inevitable. Even though we use a distributed flow control algorithm, it is shown that any kind of utility function can be used as long as the minimum slopes of the functions are greater than a certain positive value. We believe that the proposed algorithm is the first to achieve utility max-min fairness with guaranteed stability in a distributed manner.