Max-Min Fair Flow Control Sensitive to Priorities

Flow control is the dominant technique currently used in communication networks for preventing excess traffic from "flooding" the network, and for handling congestion. In ratebased flow control, transmission rates of sessions are adjusted in an end-to-end manner through a sequence of operations, each preserving the capacity constraint at each individual network link. In this work, we present a theory of max-min fair, rate-based flow control sensitive to priorities of different sessions, as a significant extension of the classical theory of max-min fair, rate-based flow control to the case of networks with guaranteed quality-ofservice (QoS). We assume a priority function for each individual session, which maps the session's nominated priority to a transmission rate. We introduce priority max-min fairness, as a novel and motivatable fairness condition which requires that assigned rates correspond, through the priority functions, to priorities comprising a max-min vector. A c..