Approximate Fairness through SRABF in Satellite Networks

Currently, a fundamental issue is to evaluate the impact of having users act in a selfish manner in various networks. It is found that oblivious control schemes can't cope with uncooperative selfish users. We approach this problem in satellite networks from first principle: a satellite router packet-dropping scheme is a mechanism that sets up a game between the senders, who are in turn competing for link capacity. This paper proposes an algorithm called SRABF (Satellite Router Allocates Bandwidth Fairly), which bases its dropping decisions on the recent history of packet arrivals and new sampling method. The performance of SRABF is aided by the fact that the vast majority of flows in satellite networks are slow but the fast flows send the bulk of the bits. This allows a small sample of recent history to provide accurate rate estimation of the fast flows. Simulation results, which we describe here, suggest that the design provides a reasonable degree of fairness in satellite networks.