A Competitive-Market Approach to Distributed Resource Allocation

TL;DRAbstract

Resource allocation is an issue in any system for which resources are in short supply. In computer networks, the resources in question are bandwidth, buffer space, and processing time, and they are allocated at multiple scales of time and quantity (e.g. from a single user's packets over a 30 second interval to a network providers backbone capacity for a 1 year interval). For military networks and computers, these resources may be scarce or limited during attack, at remote sites, etc. Decisions about resource allocation should be made in accordance with some overall policy. In many instances, this policy is referred to as the "fairness" in making resource allocation decisions. A policy that is reasonable in one situation (e.g., "normally, everyone shares equally the available bandwidth') may be unsuitable in another situation (e.g., "in times of emergency, high priority tasks get their bandwidth requests satisfied before low priority tasks are considered"). In this report, we summarize

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