Some observations on fairness of bandwidth sharing

Abstract

This paper reviews the engineering solutions and economic models for fair allocation of network bandwidth to elastic flows. Using examples, it gives insight to proportional fairness, and how it compares to the fairness achieved by TCP. The second topic is a discussion of fair bandwidth allocation between multicast and unicast flows. By separating the discussion into economic and engineering viewpoints, this paper discusses ideal solutions and suggests practical approaches to achieving reasonable fairness.