Fairness considerations with algorithms for elastic traffic routing

The bit rate of modern applications typically varies in time. We consider the traffic elastic if the rate of the sources can be controlled as a function of free resources along the route of that traffic. The objective is to route the demands optimally in sense of increasing the total network throughput while setting the rates of sources in a fair way. We propose a new fairness definition the relative fairness that handles lower and upper bounds on the traffic rate of each source and we compare it with two other known fairness definitions, namely, the max-min and the proportional rate fairness. We propose and compare different routing algorithms, all with three types of fairness definitions. The algorithms are all a tradeoff between network throughput, fairness and computational time.