A feasible per-flow allocation satisfies for each active route and . It has proportional fairness if every feasible competitor obeys
By the first-order inequality for the strictly concave logarithm, this is equivalent to maximizing weighted logarithmic utility over the feasible allocations. Inactive-route rates are immaterial; set them to zero as a convention.
Write , , , and . The capacity constraints are and . For , put . Each active local route uses its remaining capacity . Omitting constants, the utility is
Its maximum has ; when , the maximum is the endpoint . Hence for active routes
These formulas also give and when . When there is no allocated service. Equivalently, the aggregate route rates for are
This is the proportionally fair allocation on a two-resource linear network for a two-resource linear flow network.
For independent Poisson processes of documents and independent document sizes with exponential distribution of rate , the memorylessness of the exponential distribution makes the population a continuous-time Markov chain. Its transition intensities are
The departure intensity sums the independent completion hazards . There is no departure on an inactive route. Set , with .
To prove the proposed stationary distribution, define the balance function of a flow-level network
For an active local route, , while for the through route this ratio is . Thus . The weights
satisfy detailed balance on every arrival-departure pair:
Each total jump rate is bounded by , so the chain is a nonexplosive Markov chain; normalized detailed-balance weights therefore give its stationary distribution, the stationary law of a two-resource linear flow network.
Use the negative binomial series to sum first over :
The remaining two geometric series give
All summands are nonnegative. Consequently the sum is finite exactly under the stability conditions for a two-resource linear flow network
These say that the offered load on each unit-capacity resource is strictly below one. Equality is insufficient: at least one geometric series then diverges. If all arrival rates are positive, the chain is irreducible and the normalizable law is its unique equilibrium law.
Finally put , . Summing over yields
Thus the two local-route counts are independent, each with geometric distribution on the nonnegative integers. The conditional through-route count has negative binomial distribution
For positive traffic rates this depends on the local counts, so all three route counts are not independent. More quantitatively, , and likewise for . If zero arrival rates are allowed, the exceptional independent cases are , or , when the relevant counts are deterministic zero. This distinction is local-count independence with through-flow dependence.
A two-resource linear flow network has one local route on each of two resources and one through route using both. With unit capacities and proportional fairness, its exponential-document flow-level network model has the stationary law of a two-resource linear flow network. The local counts are independent in equilibrium despite their dependence on the shared through-route count.