Is fair allocation always inefficient
Ao Tang, Jiantao Wang, Steven H. Low · 2004
This paper describes the tradeoff between fairness criteria of different allocation policies and throughput in a general network. A class of utility functions parameterized by a scalar defines a bandwidth allocation policy. An allocation is fair if the scalar is large and efficient if the aggregate source rate is large. The conjecture depends on the network topology in terms of routing and link capacities. A fairer allocation is always more efficient.