Providing Deterministic End-to-end Fairness Guarantees in Core-stateless Networks1

End-to-end fairness guarantee is an important service semantics that network providers would like to offer to their customers. A network provider can offer such service semantics by deploying a network where each router employs a fair packet scheduling algorithm. Unfortunately, these scheduling algorithms require every router to maintain per-flow state and perform per-packet flow classification; these requirements limit the scalability of the routers. In this paper, we propose the Core-stateless Guaranteed Fair (CSGF) network architecture— the first work-conserving architecture that, without maintaining per-flow state or performing per-packet flow classification in core routers, provides to flows fairness guarantees similar to those provided by a network of core-stateful fair routers.