Fairness in window flow controlled computer networks

A measure is proposed that is based on two key concepts: (1) the congestion caused by a virtual circuit (VC) on the others; and (2) the penalty inflicted by the network on a VC. These two concepts are then combined to define a fairness criterion that uses the principle that a virtual circuit should not be able to congest the network more than it is being penalized by the same network. A suboptimal algorithm to select window sizes according to this fairness criterion was devised and applied to several networks; results are presented for two of these networks. The examples show that the window set produced by the algorithm does not cause any significant degradation in the net overall performance and is superior, in terms of fairness, to other window assignments methods discussed in the literature