Communication networks often have limited resources to serve all users and flows, and therefore different network resource assignment schemes have been deployed that satisfy fairness notions such as max-min fairness or proportional fairness. The justification of why one notion suits over other must be given due analysis in designing and administrating of communication networks. We explore the development of such fairness notions and resource assignment policies from philosophical and economics roots and how they translate into network communications and its layered protocol architecture. We find that resource assignment policies are not commutative, which impacts communications traffic and its bidirectional nature. We observe the effect of prioritization in assigned resource amounts under different notions of the -fairness spectrum and when the proportion of prioritized participants is varied. After an exploratory discourse, we formulate steps for designing and administrating resource allocation schemes for network communications that takes distributive justice into consideration.Resource assignment designs attempt to obtain efficiency and optimal usage of the resources. Fairness and distributive justice are quite important factors in designing network resource assignment schemes. There are various implementations of resource assignment schemes that satisfy fairness notions such as max-min fairness, proportional fairness and others. But such implementations fail to justify one particular notion over another in any particular implementation. This is due to the lack of regard to social factors and the subjective nature of fairness while developing resource assignment algorithms in communications networks. Justice and fairness are social concepts and knowing how it is conveyed in the networking world is important for anyone trying to develop resource assignment schemes in the context of communication networks.In this paper, we highlight the translation of the commonly used fairness notions in communication networks resource assignment process to the broader philosophical concepts of social justice. We identify the different notions as belonging to different schools of justice principles. We explore the prevailing instruments of prioritization of individuals in the society for assignment of resources such as price, lottery, first-come-first-served, etc. By exploring a few resource assignment areas in communication networks and some prominent works of analysing fairness there, we follow our discussion by comparing and contrasting philosophical treatment of justice and fairness in society to that in the context of communications networks.Network traffic traverse various resource assignment nodes cascaded along the network path. Such nodes of differing policies morph into an aggregated policy resulting into different assigned resource amounts, whose fairness notions are not explained by traditional notions. Such resulting notions are of significance in designing network algorithms and architecture as well as the creatio...
