article

Flow rate fairness: dismantling a religion

Author:

Bob BriscoeAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Volume 37, Issue 2

Pages 63 - 74

https://doi.org/10.1145/1232919.1232926

Published: 20 March 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Resource allocation and accountability keep reappearing on every list of requirements for the Internet architecture. The reason we never resolve these issues is a broken idea of what the problem is. The applied research and standards communities are using completely unrealistic and impractical fairness criteria. The resulting mechanisms 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 thinking about fairness mechanisms like TCP in terms of sharing out flow rates has no intellectual heritage from any concept of fairness in philosophy or social science, or indeed real life. Comparing flow rates should never again be used for claims of fairness in production networks. Instead, we should judge fairness mechanisms on how they share out the 'cost' of each user's actions on others

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Cited By

Zapletal AKuipers F(2023)Slowdown as a Metric for Congestion Control FairnessProceedings of the 22nd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3626111.3628185(205-212)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626111.3628185
Spang BKunamalla STeixeira RHuang TArmitage GJohari RMcKeown NSchulzrinne HKohler EMaltz DMisra V(2023)Sammy: smoothing video traffic to be a friendly internet neighborProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference10.1145/3603269.3604839(754-768)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603269.3604839
Islam SHiorth KGriwodz CWelzl M(2022)Is it really necessary to go beyond a fairness metric for next-generation congestion control?Proceedings of the Workshop on Applied Networking Research10.1145/3547115.3547192(1-7)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3547115.3547192
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Flow rate fairness: dismantling a religion
1. Networks
  1. Network architectures
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Computing / technology policy

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 37, Issue 2

April 2007

99 pages

ISSN:0146-4833

DOI:10.1145/1232919

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2007 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 20 March 2007

Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 37, Issue 2

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Cited By

Zapletal AKuipers F(2023)Slowdown as a Metric for Congestion Control FairnessProceedings of the 22nd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3626111.3628185(205-212)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626111.3628185
Spang BKunamalla STeixeira RHuang TArmitage GJohari RMcKeown NSchulzrinne HKohler EMaltz DMisra V(2023)Sammy: smoothing video traffic to be a friendly internet neighborProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference10.1145/3603269.3604839(754-768)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603269.3604839
Islam SHiorth KGriwodz CWelzl M(2022)Is it really necessary to go beyond a fairness metric for next-generation congestion control?Proceedings of the Workshop on Applied Networking Research10.1145/3547115.3547192(1-7)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3547115.3547192
Yu LSonchack JLiu VKuipers FOrda A(2022)CebinaeProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544240(219-232)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544216.3544240
Arun VAlizadeh MBalakrishnan HKuipers FOrda A(2022)Starvation in end-to-end congestion controlProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544223(177-192)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544216.3544223
Weghorn TLiu SSprenger CPerrig ABasin D(2022)N-Tube: Formally Verified Secure Bandwidth Reservation in Path-Aware Internet Architectures2022 IEEE 35th Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)10.1109/CSF54842.2022.9919646(147-162)Online publication date: Aug-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF54842.2022.9919646
Chen HZhan HZhang PTan H(2022)PeCo: Minimizing Bandwidth Cost for CDN Systems2022 8th International Conference on Big Data Computing and Communications (BigCom)10.1109/BigCom57025.2022.00017(71-78)Online publication date: Aug-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/BigCom57025.2022.00017
Mazur IRak JNowicki K(2021)Ensuring the QoE-Related Fairness to Reduce the User Abandonment RatioSensors10.3390/s2121705021:21(7050)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/s21217050
Spang BHannan VKunamalla SHuang TMcKeown NJohari RLevin DMislove AAmann JLuckie M(2021)Unbiased experiments in congested networksProceedings of the 21st ACM Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3487552.3487851(80-95)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2021
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Sander CKunze IWehrle KRüth J(2021)Video Conferencing and Flow-Rate Fairness: A First Look at Zoom and the Impact of Flow-Queuing AQMPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-030-72582-2_1(3-19)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2021
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