A multi-criteria approach to fair and efficient bandwidth allocation☆

Abstract

In systems which serve many users there is a need to respect some fairness rules while looking for the overall efficiency. This applies among others to network design where a central issue is how to allocate bandwidth to flows efficiently and fairly. The so-called max-min fairness is widely used to meet these goals. However, allocating the bandwidth to optimize the worst performance may cause a large worsening of the overall throughput of the network. In this paper we show how the concepts of mult-criteria equitable optimization can effectively be used to generate various fair and efficient allocation schemes. We introduce a multi-criteria model equivalent to equitable optimization and we develop a corresponding reference point procedure to generate fair and efficient bandwidth allocations. Our analysis is focused on the nominal network design for elastic traffic that is currently the most significant traffic of IP networks. The procedure is tested on a sample network dimensioning problem for elastic traffic and its abilities to model various preferences are demonstrated. ᭧

Inequity averse optimization in operational research

“…Applications include bandwidth or channel allocation (Tomaszewski, 2005;Lee et al, 2004;Lee & Cho, 2007;Luss, 2008;Salles & Barria, 2008;Ogryczak et al, 2008;Luss, 2010;Luss, 2012a;Jeong et al, 2005;Chang et al, 2006;Zukerman et al, 2008;Morell et al, 2008;Zhang & Ansari, 2010;Bonald et al, 2006;Heikkinen, 2004;Ogryczak et al, 2005;Kunqi et al, 2007), water rights allocation (Udías et al, 2012), health care planning (Earnshaw et al, 2007;Demirci et al, 2012;Hooker & Williams, 2012;Bertsimas et al, 2013), WIP (Kanban) allocation in production systems (Ryan & Vorasayan, 2005), fixed cost allocation (Li et al, 2013;Butler & Williams, 2006), and public resource allocation such as allocating voting machines to election precincts . There are also studies that consider general resource allocation settings such as Bertsimas et al (2011), Hooker (2010, Nace and Orlin (2007), Medernach and Sanlaville (2012) and Bertsimas et al (2014).…”

“…Bertsimas et al (2014) propose a modeling framework for general dynamic resource allocation Table 2 Classical problems in OR re-considered with equity concerns. Tomaszewski (2005), Lee, Moon, and Cho (2004), Lee and Cho (2007), Luss (2008), Salles and Barria (2008), Ogryczak, Wierzbicki, and Milewski (2008), Luss (2010), Luss (2012a), Jeong, Kim, and Lee (2005), Chang, Lee, and Kim (2006), Zukerman, Mammadov, Tan, Ouveysi, and Andrew (2008), Morell, Seco-Granados, and Vázquez-Castro (2008), Zhang and Ansari (2010), Bonald, Massoulié, Proutière, andVirtamo (2006), Heikkinen (2004), Ogryczak, Pioro, and Tomaszewski (2005), Udías, Ríos Insua, Cano, and Fellag (2012), Earnshaw, Hicks, Richter, and Honeycutt (2007), Demirci, Schaefer, Romeijn, and Roberts (2012), Hooker and Williams (2012), Bertsimas, Farias, and Trichakis (2013), Ryan and Vorasayan (2005), Li, Yang, Chen, Dai, and Liang (2013), Butler and Williams (2006), Yang, Allen, Fry, and Kelton (2013), Trichakis (2011), Bertsimas, Farias, andTrichakis (2012), Hooker (2010), Nace and Orlin (2007), Medernach and Sanlaville (2012), Bertsimas, Gupta, and Lulli (2014), Karsu and Morton (2014), Johnson, Turcotte, and Sullivan (2010), Kozanidis (2009), Eiselt and Marianov (2008), Vossen and Ball (2006), …”

“…As an application example, Ogryczak et al (2008) consider equitable optimisation in bandwidth allocation. For practical purposes, they consider a restricted set of criteria and find equitable solutions for the restricted model using the reference point approach.…”

“…The studies we encountered that consider interactive approaches are Kostreva et al (2004) and Ogryczak et al (2008), which use a reference point approach and Karsu, Morton, and Argyris (2012), which use the convex cones approach to incorporate DM's preference information to guide the selection or ranking process.…”

On fair and efficient bandwidth allocation by the multiple target approach

“…Indeed, the multiple criteria problem (11) may serve as a source of various fair allocation schemes [13], [15]. Although defined with simple linear constraints, the quantitiesθ k (x) , used as criteria in (11), introduce m 2 additional variables and inequalities while m corresponds to the number of ordered pairs of network nodes which is already on the order of the square of the number of nodes |V |.…”