A Mathematical Model for Efficient and Fair Resource Assignment in Multipath Transport

Abstract

Multipath transport protocols are aimed at increasing the throughput of data flows as well as maintaining fairness between users, which are both crucial factors to maximize user satisfaction. In this paper, a mixed (non)linear programming (MINLP) solution is developed which provides an optimum solution to allocate link capacities in a network to a number of given traffic demands considering both the maximization of link utilization as well as fairness between transport layer data flows or subflows. The solutions of the MINLP formulation are evaluated w. r. t. their throughput and fairness using well-known metrics from the literature. It is shown that network flow fairness based capacity allocation achieves better fairness results than the bottleneck-based methods in most cases while yielding the same capacity allocation performance.

Keywords

• multipath transport
• fairness
• linear programming