End-to-end fairness analysis of fair queuing networks

In this paper, we present the first end-to-end fairness analysis of a network of fair servers. We argue that it is difficult to extend existing single-node fairness analysis to an end-to-end analysis of a network where each node may employ a different fair scheduling algorithm. We then present a two-step approach for end-to-end fairness analysis of heterogeneous networks. First, we define a class of scheduling algorithms, referred to as the fair throughput (FT) class, and prove that most known fair scheduling algorithms belong to this class. Second, we develop an analysis methodology for deriving the end-to-end fairness bounds for a network of FT servers. Our analysis is general and can be applied to heterogeneous networks where different nodes employ different scheduling algorithms from the FT class.