[Iccrg] Flow Rate Fairness: Dismantling a Religion

[Doan B. Hoang]

Hi Bob,

I have read your "Flow Rate Fairness: Dismantling a Religion" paper with 
great interest.
It is rather refreshing to look at congestion from a cost-based fairness 
approach. This may lead
to more interesting and more effective solutions to network congestion 
as the cost--based
approach takes into account users' strategy in maximizing their utility 
(either legitimately or by
exploiting loopholes).

However, I would not say that "flow rate approach" community has been 
barking on the wrong tree. Rather,
the flow rate approach is more network-centric; it does not take users 
(external to the network) and their strategies
into account. The flow rate approach is thus narrower in scope than the 
cost-based approach.

I will provide some comments on your paper in another email.

Doan

Bob Briscoe wrote:

> ICCRG folks,
>
> Here's the memo on deconstructing the Internet community's dominant 
> fairness ideology that I promised. It should appear in internet-drafts 
> shortly, but you can pull the tech report off my Web site now if you 
> prefer.
>
> To some of you it will not be anything new, but I have found that very 
> many people have got into a trap in their thinking, so I'm trying to 
> jump people out of what is actually a self-referential dogma. Concepts 
> of fairness in TCP, WFQ and so on are all afflicted with this dogma 
> which is actually way off beam relative to any reasonable views of 
> fairness in real life. It's deliberately blunt and simplified.
>
> Flow Rate Fairness: Dismantling a Religion
> <http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/B.Briscoe/projects/2020comms/refb/fair_tr.pdf> 
>
>
> Abstract: We were moved to write this memo because the applied 
> research and standards communities in networking are using completely 
> unrealistic and impractical fairness criteria. The issue is not 
> whether they should use this or that allocation scheme; they don't 
> even allocate the right thing and they don't allocate it between the 
> right entities. We explain as bluntly as we can that sharing out flow 
> rates (as TCP and many other popular fairness mechanisms do) has no 
> intellectual heritage from any concept of fairness in philosophy or 
> social science, or indeed real life. Comparing and controlling flow 
> rates alone will never achieve fairness and should never again be 
> claimed as a fairness mechanism for production networks. Instead, a 
> realistic fairness mechanism must share out the `cost' of each users 
> actions on others.
>
> Here's the same text formatted as an I-D, but it becomes twice as long:
> <http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/B.Briscoe/pubs.html#rateFairDis>
>
> I may not be able to get into discussions over the next week or so, 
> given other deadlines...
>
>
> Bob
>
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________________________ 
>
> Notice: This contribution is the personal view of the author and does 
> not necessarily reflect the technical nor commercial direction of BT plc.
> ____________________________________________________________________________ 
>
> Bob Briscoe,                           Networks Research Centre, BT 
> Research
> B54/77 Adastral Park,Martlesham Heath,Ipswich,IP5 3RE,UK.    +44 1473 
> 645196
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Iccrg mailing list
> Iccrg at cs.ucl.ac.uk
> http://oakham.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/iccrg


-- 
Doan B. Hoang
University of Technology, Sydney	
URL: http://research.it.uts.edu.au/arn