ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a framework to evaluate the fairness of various protocols in a general telecommunications network. Within this framework, there are two key components: a benchmark and a single-dimension metric. It suggests to use the max-min fairness bandwidth allocation as the benchmark and the Euclidean distance between any bandwidth allocation under any protocol and the max-min bandwidth allocation as the metric. The chapter provides a method to compare the fairness of two sets of bandwidth allocation under two different protocols for a given network by using this metric. It evaluates the fairness of FAST TCP and TCP Reno relative to the max-min fairness criteria. The chapter presents how this method can be applied to compare the fairness of FAST TCP and TCP Reno for a "Parking Lot" linear network and for the NSFNET Backbone network. The performance of Vegas approaches that of FAST when the queuing delay is very much less than the propagation delay.
