User fair queuing: fair allocation of bandwidth for users

User fairness aims at fairly distributing the network resources among users, where a user is an entity that can possibly send different flows through different paths. In this paper we first propose a criterion for user fairness based on political economics fairness theory: the user maxmin fairness criterion. Then we propose an architecture, user fair queuing (UFQ), that provides user maxmin fairness without keeping per-user state in the core nodes. UFQ requires neither admission control nor signaling. We present simulations and analysis on the performance of the proposed architecture.