B-Neck: A Distributed and Quiescent Max-Min Fair Algorithm

Abstract

The problem of fairly distributing the capacity of a network among a set of sessions has been widely studied. In this problem, each session connects via a single path a source and a destination, and its goal is to maximize its assigned transmission rate (i.e., its throughput). Since the links of the network have limited bandwidths, some criterion has to be defined to fairly distribute their capacity among the sessions. A popular criterion is max-min fairness that, in short, guarantees that each session i gets a rate ?i such that no session s can increase ?s without causing another session s' to end up with a rate ?s'