Fair Allocation of Throughput Under Harsh Operational Conditions

Fairness plays an important role in networking as it fundamentally describes how different communication participants access and share network resources. The fair sharing of resources becomes complicated when the network faces harsh operational conditions, which may be associated with mutual interference or adversarial conditions. In this paper, we study the problem of fair allocation of resources in a network facing harsh operational conditions associated with communication transmission. Such a problem is becoming increasingly relevant in wireless system design as multiple wireless technologies are being deployed in shared spectrum, e.g. WiFi and LTE-U, and wireless networks are facing unprecedented levels of malicious activities. To obtain insight into this problem we suggest a simple game theoretical model involving resource allocation. We solve the game explicitly, which allows us to explore the structure of resource allocation strategies, and thereby provide guidance into the integration of fair resource allocation in networks.