Network sharing fairness function with consideration of priority levels

An important issue of computer network management is to distribute network resource fairly to its users. The first quantitative fairness score function F(x1,x2,…,xn)F(x1,x2,…,xn) was proposed in 1984 by Jain et al. [1] for evaluating network resource sharing fairness. Chen and Zhang (2005) [6] proposed another fairness score function G(x1,x2,…,xn)G(x1,x2,…,xn) which better fits the real world situation in some cases. This paper considers the situation that the users can have different priority levels. A modified fairness score function G∗(x1,x2,…,xn;w1,w2,…,wn)G∗(x1,x2,…,xn;w1,w2,…,wn) is proposed. The proposed fairness score function can deal with the situation that the network resource users have different priority levels, and can keep all the nice properties of G(x1,x2,…,xn)G(x1,x2,…,xn).