A Unified Flow Control Approach for QoS Balance in Differentiated Services

Proportional, TCP friendly (minimum potential delay) and max-min fairness are three most commonly used fairness criteria for resource allocation in communication networks. In this paper, we generalize the above fairness criteria in terms of utility and study the resource allocation problem for heterogeneous networks where contending users may have different Quality of Services (QoS) requirements and the utility functions may not necessarily satisfy the strict concavity condition, such as real-time applications. We propose a QoS based flow control algorithm and with different link price feedback mechanisms, utility weighted proportional, TCP friendly and max-min fairness is achieved in this unified approach. In addition, the new algorithm is not only suitable for elastic data traffic, but also capable of handling real-time applications, and therefore it can be treated as an efficient flow control mechanism to provide congestion control and QoS balance for Differentiated Services in the future Internet.