Maxmin Fairness under Priority for Network Resource Allocation Tasks

Many network control policies can benefit from introducing priorities among users, traffic flows, or service provisions e.g. For QoS improvement or network congestion avoidance. In order to ensure fairness of concomitant resource sharing tasks, generic extensions of maxmin fairness under priority are considered. A critical analysis of existing approaches leads to the definition of two fairness relations based on formal modifications of the maxmin fairness standard of comparison. One is based on using priority functions for internal weighting, the other on priority classes. Experimental evaluation shows that maximizing under these relations indeed gives relations close to maxmin fairness that take priorities into account such that higher priority users receive higher allocations in average. Further studying the wireless channel allocation model problem shows that prioritizing can give solutions of higher efficiency than maxmin fairness.