Equilibrium bandwidth and buffer allocations for elastic traffics

Consider a set of users sharing a network node under an allocation scheme that provides each user with a fixed minimum and a random extra amount of bandwidth and buffer. Allocations and prices are adjusted to adapt to resource availability and user demands. Equilibrium is achieved when all users optimize their utility and demand equals supply for nonfree resources. We analyze two models of user behavior. We show that at equilibrium expected return on purchasing variable resources can be higher than that on fixed resources. Thus users must balance the marginal increase in utility due to higher return on variable resources and the marginal decrease in utility due to their variability. For the first user model we further show that at equilibrium where such tradeoff is optimized all users hold strictly positive amounts of variable bandwidth and buffer. For the second model we show that if both variable bandwidth and buffer are scarce then at equilibrium every user either holds both variable resources or none

Statistical Service Guarantees for Traffic Scheduling in High-Speed Data Networks

School of Electrical and Computer Engineerin

The Cost of Quality in Networks of Aggregate Traffic

We relate burstiness (or indifference) curves for stochastic traffic flows to the quality they experience under the allocation of the resources of bandwidth and buffer space. We use this relation to explore the quality experienced by merged flows under various rules for allocating resources to them, including one motivated by the Controlled Load service specification. We show how cost structures on the resources can be used to encourage optimal use of shared resources amongst heterogeneous flows