Fluid limits for networks with bandwidth sharing and general document size distributions (Q1009487)

The authors consider a stochastic model of Internet congestion control that represents the randomly varying number of flows in a network where bandwidth is shared among document transfers. In contrast to an earlier work by \textit{F. P. Kelly} and \textit{R. J. Williams} [Ann. Appl. Probab. 14, No. 3, 1055--1083 (2004; Zbl 1066.60093)], the present paper allows interarrival times and document sizes to be generally distributed, rather than exponentially distributed. Furthermore, they allow a fairly general class of bandwidth sharing policies that includes the weighted \(\alpha \)-fair policies of \textit{J. Mo} and \textit{J. Walrand} [Fair end-to-end window-based congestion control. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 8, 556--567 (2000)], as well as certain other utility based scheduling policies. To describe the evolution of the system, measure valued processes are used to keep track of the residual document sizes of all flows through the network. A fluid model (or formal functional law of large numbers approximation) associated with the stochastic flow level model is proposed. Under mild conditions, they show that the appropriately rescaled measure valued processes corresponding to a sequence of such models (with fixed network structure) are tight, and that any weak limit point of the sequence is almost surely a fluid model solution. For the special case of weighted \(\alpha \)-fair policies, they also characterize the invariant states of the fluid model.