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".