Efficiency-fairness tradeoff in telecommunications networks

Introducing the concept of α-fairness, which allows for a bounded fairness compromise, so that no source is allocated less than a fraction α of its fair share, this letter studies tradeoffs between efficiency (utilization, throughput or revenue) and fairness in a general telecommunications network with relation to any fairness criterion. We formulate a linear program that finds the optimal bandwidth allocation by maximizing efficiency subject to α-fairness constraints. This leads to what we call an efficiency-fairness curve, which shows the benefit in efficiency as a function of the extent to which fairness is compromised.