Max-min Fairness - Comparison With Other Policies For Resource Sharing

Comparison With Other Policies For Resource Sharing

Generally, policies for sharing resources that are characterized by low level of fairness (see fairness measures) provide high average throughput but low stability in the service quality, meaning that the achieved service quality is varying in time depending on the behavior of other users. If this instability is severe, it may result in unhappy users that will choose another more stable communication service.

Max-min fair resource sharing results in higher average throughput (or system spectral efficiency in wireless networks) and better utilization of the resources than a work-conserving equal sharing policy of the resources. In equal sharing, some dataflows may not be able to utilize their "fair share" of the resources. A policy for equal sharing would prevent a dataflow from obtaining more resources than any other flow, and from utilizing free resources in the network.

On the other hand, max-min fairness provides lower average throughput than maximum throughput resource management, where the least expensive flows are assigned all capacity they can use, and no capacity might remain for the most expensive flows. In a wireless network, an expensive user is typically a mobile station at far distance from the base station, exposed to high signal attenuation. However, a maximum throughput policy would result in starvation of expensive flows, and may result in fewer "happy customers".

A compromise between max-min fairness and maximum throughput scheduling is proportional fairness, where the resources are divided with the goal to achieve the same cost to each user, or to minimize the maximum cost per unit that a dataflow reaches. Expensive data flows achieves lower service quality than others in proportional fairness, but does not suffer from starvation. Max-min fairness results in more stable service quality, and therefore perhaps "happier customers".

Read more about this topic:  Max-min Fairness

Famous quotes containing the words comparison with, comparison, policies, resource and/or sharing:

    He was a superior man. He did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. For once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Modern women are squeezed between the devil and the deep blue sea, and there are no lifeboats out there in the form of public policies designed to help these women combine their roles as mothers and as workers.
    Sylvia Ann Hewitt (20th century)

    In a world which furnishes so many employments which are useful, and so many which are amusing, it is our own fault if we ever know what ennui [boredom] is, or if we are ever driven to the miserable resource of gaming, which corrupts our dispositions, and teaches us a habit of hostility against all mankind.
    Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)

    So close is the bond between man and woman that you can not raise one without lifting the other. The world can not move ahead without woman’s sharing in the movement, and to help give a right impetus to that movement is woman’s highest privilege.
    Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)