Differentiated End-to-End Internet Services using a Weighted Proportional Fair Sharing TCP

TL;DR

This paper explores applying weighted proportional fairness to Internet data flows, allowing user-defined weights to optimize network utility, with practical implementations and potential for differentiated service management.

Contribution

It introduces methods to weight TCP connections for proportional fairness and demonstrates their effectiveness through simulations and prototypes.

Findings

Weighted fairness improves network utility

TCP parameter manipulation enables differentiated services

Simulation results validate the proposed approach

Abstract

In this document we study the application of weighted proportional fairness to data flows in the Internet. We let the users set the weights of their connections in order to maximise the utility they get from the network. When combined with a pricing scheme where connections are billed by weight and time, such a system is known to maximise the total utility of the network. Our study case is a national Web cache server connected to long distance links. We propose two ways of weighting TCP connections by manipulating some parameters of the protocol and present results from simulations and prototypes. We finally discuss how proportional fairness could be used to implement an Internet with differentiated services.