Fairness Index

Lee Cheng-Ta

October 3, 2006
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Jains Fairness Index

Fairness Index =

Fairness

( i 1 xi )
n n

n i 1 xi2

where xi is the normalized throughput (in Kbps) of the ith TCP flow and n is the number of connections. Example: A scheme gives 50, 30, 50 Mbps (throughput, ti) when the optimal is 50, 10, 10 Mbps (fair throughput, oi)
Normalized Throughput: xi = ti/oi 50/50, 30/10, 50/10 1, 3, 5

Fairness Index =(1+3+5)2 / 3(12+32+52) =92 / 3(1+9+25)= 0.77 1, 4, 5 0.79 1, 2, 5 0.71

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Fairness Index: Properties

Scale independent
Standard deviation (Throughput) = 10 Mbps = 104 kbps

Bounded
between 0 and 1 or 0 and 100% variance, standard deviation, and relative distance are not bounded.

Direct relationship:
Higher index More Fair Higher variance Less fair

Continuous
min/max is not continuous. The index should be continuous. Any slight change in allocation should show up in the fairness index. In the above example, if the normalized throughput is 1, 4, and 5 respectively, the fairness should obviously be different, yet it is not reflected in the min-max ratio which remain at 1/5.
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References
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R. Jain, W. Hawe, D. Chiu, A Quantitative measure of fairness and discrimination for resource allocation in Shared Computer Systems, DEC-TR-301, September 26, 1984, http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~jain/papers/fairness.htm Yu, O.; Saric, E.; Li, A.; Fairly adjusted multimode dynamic guard bandwidth admission control over CDMA systems , IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Volume 24, Issue 3, March 2006 Page(s):579 - 592 (2005/2/21) Krishnamachari, B.; Ordonez, F ,Analysis of energy-efficient, fair routing in wireless sensor networks through non-linear optimization, 2003 IEEE 58th Vehicular Technology Conference, 2003. VTC 2003-Fall. Volume 5, 6-9 Oct. 2003 Page(s):2844 2848 Vol.5 (2005/9/22) Baochun Li, End-to-End Fair Bandwidth Allocation in MultiHop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, 25th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, June 2005 Page(s):471 480 (2005/9/22)