On multi-criteria approaches to bandwidth allocation

Modern telecommunication networks face an increasing demand for services. Among these, an increasing number are services that can adapt to available bandwidth, and are therefore referred to as elastic traffic. Nominal network design for elastic traffic becomes increasingly significant. Typical resource allocation methods are concerned with the allocation of limited resources among competing activities so as to achieve the best overall performance of the system. In the network dimensioning problem for elastic traffic, one needs to allocate bandwidth to maximize service flows and simultaneously to reach a fair treatment of all the elastic services. Thus, both the overall efficiency (throughput) and the fairness (equity) among various services are important. In such applications, the so-called Max-Min Fairness (MMF) solution concept is widely used to formulate the resource allocation scheme. This approach guarantees fairness but may lead to significant losses in the overall throughput of the network. In this paper we show how the concepts of multiple criteria equitable optimization can be effectively used to generate various fair resource allocation schemes. We introduce a multiple criteria model ecluivalent to equitable optimization and we develop a corresponding reference point procedure to generate fair efficient bandwidth allocations. The procedure is tested on a sample network dimensioning problem and its abilities to model various preferences are demonstrated.