Round-robin scheduling for max-min fairness in data networks

The author studies a simple strategy, proposed independently by E.L. Hahne and R.G. Gallager (1986) and M.G.H. Katevenis (1987), for fairly allocating link capacity in a point-to-point packet network with virtual circuit routing. Each link offers its packet transmission slots to its user sessions by polling them in round-robin order. In addition, window flow control is used to prevent excessive packet queues at the network nodes. As the window size increases, the session throughput rates are shown to approach limits that are perfectly fair in the max-min sense. If each session has periodic input (perhaps with jitter) or has such heavy demand that packets are always waiting to enter the network, then a finite window size suffices to produce perfectly fair throughput rates. The results suggest that the transmission capacity not used by the small window session will be approximately fairly divided among the large window sessions. The focus is on the worst-case performance of round-robin scheduling with windows