Utility Max-Min Flow Control Using Slope-Restricted Utility Functions

Abstract

Abstract-We present a network architecture for the distributed utility max-min flow control of elastic and nonelastic flows where utility values of users (rather than data rates of users) are enforced to achieve max-min fairness. The proposed link algorithm converges to utility max-min fair bandwidth allocation in the presence of round-trip delays without using 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. Though our analysis is limited to the single-bottleneck and homogeneous-delay case, we believe that the proposed algorithm is the first to achieve utility max-min fairness with guaranteed stability in a distributed manner.

A linear consensus approach to quality-fair video delivery

“…Rather static video contents such as news may be efficiently delivered with a moderate bit rate, that would be insufficient to enjoy an action motion picture of decent quality. This has motivated the recent development of quality-fair video delivery techniques, such as [2], [6], [7], [12].…”

“…For example, [6] considers an utility max-min fair resource allocation, which tries to maximize the worst utility. Nevertheless, it does not consider the temporal variability of the rate-utility characteristics of the contents, or the delays introduced by the network and the buffers of the delivery system.…”

Utility Proportional Fair Bandwidth Allocation: An Optimization Oriented Approach

“…In [9], Cao and Zegura present a link algorithm that achieves a utility maxmin fair bandwidth allocation, where for each link the utility functions of all flows sharing that link is maintained. In [10], Cho and Song present a utility max-min architecture, where each link communicates a supported utility value to sources using that link. Then sources adapt their sending rates according to the minimum of these utility values.…”

“…We emphasize, that our distributed algorithm does not need any per-flow information at the links. The feedback from links to sources does not include overhead, such as explicit utility values as done in [10]. It merely relies on the communication of Lagrange multipliers, called shadow prices, from the links to the sources.…”

A Flow Control Algorithm Achieving Application Level Fairness

“…The idea of using application specific utility function that maps bandwidth to a satisfaction level has been proposed [1], [6], [15]. This idea can be considered as an extension of Kelly's framework, in which strict concave utility functions are used.…”