Fairness is an important performance criterion in all resource allocation schemes, including those in distributed computer systems. However, it is often specified only qualitatively. The quantitative measures proposed in the literature are either too specific to a particular application, or suffer from some undesirable characteristics. In this paper, we have introduced a quantitative measure called Indiex of FRairness. The index is applicable to any resource sharing or allocation problem. It is independent of the amount of the resource. The fairness index always lies between 0 and 1. This boundedness aids intuitive understanding of the fairness index. For example, a distribution algorithm with a fairness of 0.10 means that it is unfair to 90% of the users. Also, the discrimination index can be defined as 1 - fairness index.

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