IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Stability and instability of fluid models for reentrant lines
Mathematics of Operations Research
The iSLIP scheduling algorithm for input-queued switches
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Open, Closed, and Mixed Networks of Queues with Different Classes of Customers
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
The effects of temporary sessions on network performance
SODA '00 Proceedings of the eleventh annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Universal-stability results and performance bounds for greedy contention-resolution protocols
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Instability of FIFO at Arbitrarily Low Rates in the Adversarial Queueing Model
FOCS '03 Proceedings of the 44th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
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Instability in packet-switching networks is normally associated with overload conditions, since queueing network models show that, in simple configurations, only overload generates instability. However, some results showing that instability can happen also in underloaded queueing networks began to appear about a decade ago. Underload instabilities can be produced by: 1) customer routes that visit the same queues several times; 2) variations of the customer service times at the different queues; and 3) complex scheduling algorithms. In this paper, we study, using fluid models and adversarial queueing theory, possible underload instabilities due to flow schedulers in packet networks, focusing on output queued switches with strict priority (SP) schedulers and Generalized Processor Sharing (GPS) schedulers. The considered scenarios always refer to acyclic packet routes and consider customer service times that vary only according to channel capacities, thus resembling the approaches being currently considered to provide QoS in the Internet. Our (in)stability results are rather surprising: SP schedulers appear to be more robust than GPS schedulers whenever exact information on the effective average packet flow rates is not available.