Patent ID: 7848355

Claim:
A method for optimizing resource allocation, the method comprising steps of: inferring global properties of a neighborhood comprising peer nodes i from a summarization of information obtained locally at each peer node i, wherein the neighborhood is a set of all nodes with which the peer node i can potentially exchange data, and a neighbor node is a node j in the neighborhood other than the peer node i, the inferring step comprising: computing resource allocation dependencies of each peer node i based on local information, comprising steps of: computing network bandwidth dependencies for all nodes except source nodes; steps performed by each peer node i: computing node i's current bandwidth allocation for each neighboring node j in the neighborhood; notifying neighboring node j of its current allocation, for all node i's neighboring nodes, by sending messages; collecting current allocations from all nodes j in the neighborhood; computing a current total incoming rate for node i as a sum of the bandwidth allocations for all nodes j in the neighborhood; notifying all nodes j of the current total incoming rate; collecting all current incoming rates from all nodes in the neighborhood; and computing a dependency for each node j in the neighborhood as a ratio of the bandwidth per connection of each node j to the sum of the bandwidth per connection of all nodes in node i's neighborhood; propagating the resource allocation dependency information for each peer node i to its neighboring nodes j; calculating resource target rates for each neighbor node j; and allocating resources of each peer node i to its neighbor nodes j in accordance with the propagated dependency information.