Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2003 iii Paper 34 4 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
For active-route per-flow rates , feasibility means for every resource. The defining condition for a proportionally fair allocation is that every feasible alternative satisfiesThis is equivalent to maximizing weighted logarithmic utility over the feasible set. Its gradient is , so the displayed inequality is precisely the first-order condition for this concave function. Strict concavity gives unique active-flow rates. Routes with have no utility term or actual per-flow rate to determine; set their aggregate service to zero. This is the inactive routes in proportional fairness convention.
Abbreviate the route populations as in cyclic order and let denote aggregate route service. The resource constraints areEquivalently, . Fix these two maxima as . Because utility is increasing in each active allocation, every active odd route attains and every active even route attains . Dropping terms constant in the populations, the objective becomesIf both groups are nonempty, the maximum has and derivative , giving . If one group is empty, every route in the other group gets aggregate service one. For , all cases are summarized, on active routes, byAt there are no flows and all aggregate services are zero. In particular whenever , as printed in the PDF. The per-flow rate is not generally : opposite routes can use the same resource capacities in parallel.
An exponential document size with parameter has completion hazard when a flow is served at rate . Summing over its flows gives the transition ratesThus an active odd route departs at rate , and an active even route at rate . An empty route has departure rate zero even if its opposite route is populated.
Put andFor an active odd route and an active even route respectively,Hence aggregate service is the neighboring-state ratio of this balance function of a flow-level network. Consider weights . For every birth edge,These are detailed balance equations. The total departure rate is bounded by and total arrival rate by , so the process is nonexplosive. Provided the normalizing sum is finite, its stationary distribution is thereforeThe large parentheses in the original PDF represent a binomial coefficient, not a ratio. The verified adjacent-state ratios explain why that distinction matters.
The required stability condition can be established directly from the normalizing sum. Set , and . Grouping opposite-route counts givesIf and , then , with the same bounds for the other group. Restriction to the routes attaining the maxima bounds below by . If , the upper bound is at most , which converges. ThusEquivalently every resource's offered load is strictly below its unit capacity. With positive arrival rates the irreducible chain then has the unique stationary probability distribution above. Without this condition the weights remain an invariant measure but are not normalizable; the question's probability-distribution claim implicitly needs this hypothesis.
For completeness, the normalizing constant has the four-cycle partition function expressionTo derive it when and , substitute into the double sum and use . The resulting expression iswhich simplifies to the displayed formula. Continuity within the stability region covers equal opposite loads and zero loads.