Fair resource allocation and stability for communication networks with multipath routing
Shiyong Li, Wei Sun, Changchun Hua · International Journal of Systems Science · 2013
Multipath networks allow that each source-destination pair can have several different paths for data transmission, thus they improve the performance of increasingly bandwidth-hungry applications and well cater for traffic load balancing and bandwidth usage efficiency. This paper investigates fair resource allocation for users in multipath networks and formulates it as a multipath network utility maximisation problem with several fairness concepts. By applying the Lagrangian method, sub-problems for users and paths are derived from the resource allocation model and interpreted from an economic point of view. In order to solve the model, a novel rate-based flow control algorithm is proposed for achieving optimal resource allocation, which depends only on local information. In the presence of round-trip delays, sufficient conditions are obtained for local stability of the delayed algorithm. As for the end-to-end implementation in Internet, a window-based flow control mechanism is presented since it is more convenient to implement than rate-based flow control.