Fair Bandwidth Allocation under User Capacity Constraints

In this paper, we present a theoretical framework and a distributed mechanism for fair bandwidth allocation on a network with various bottleneck links. In our model, a user is guaranteed a minimum bandwidth and charged a price for a bandwidth capacity request. We defined a utility function that reflects user's bandwidth demand when the user requests the bandwidth capacity. We then present a non-cooperative game with social welfare function to resolve users' conflicting bandwidth capacity requests at bottleneck links. We also show that our proposed game-theoretic solution guarantees fair bandwidth allocation as defined in our residual capacity fairness. In order to guarantee the minimum bandwidth requirement, we integrate an admission control in our solution. However, global optimal admission conditions are not easy to implement for large networks. We therefore propose a distributed admission scheme. As a result, the paper presents fair and practical distributed algorithms for bandwidth allocation and admission control in enterprise networks. Our simulation and evaluation study show that the distributed approach is sufficiently close to the global optimal solution.