US Patent 8144590 Distributed resource allocation in stream processing systems

A system and method for resource allocation includes, in a network having nodes and links, injecting units of flow for at least one commodity at a source corresponding to the at least one commodity. At each node, queue heights, associated with the at least one commodity, are balanced for queues associated with each of one or more outgoing paths associated with that node. An amount of commodity flow is pushed across a link toward a sink, where the amount of commodity flow is constrained by a capacity constraint. Flow that reached the sink is absorbed by draining the queues.