Abstract
Quantifying the notion of fairness is underexplored when there are multiple types of resources and users request different ratios of the different resources. A typical example is data centers processing jobs with heterogeneous resource requirements on CPU, memory, network bandwidth, etc. In such cases, a tradeoff arises between equitability, or 'fairness,' and efficiency. This paper develops a unifying framework addressing the fairness-efficiency tradeoff in light of multiple types of resources. We develop two families of fairness functions that provide different tradeoffs, characterize the effect of user requests' heterogeneity, and prove conditions under which these fairness measures satisfy the Pareto efficiency, sharing incentive, and envy-free properties. Intuitions behind the analysis are explained in two visualizations of multiresource allocation. We also investigate people's fairness perceptions through an online survey of allocation preferences.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 6403598 |
Pages (from-to) | 1785-1798 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking |
Volume | 21 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 2013 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Software
- Computer Science Applications
- Computer Networks and Communications
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Keywords
- Data center
- efficiency
- fairness
- multiresource allocation
- resource allocation
- tradeoff