Deciding stability in packet-switched FIFO networks under the adversarial queuing model in polynomial time

Abstract

In spite of the importance of the FIFO protocol and the research efforts invested in obtaining results for it, deciding whether a given (packet-switched) network is stable under FIFO has remained an open question for several years. In this work, we address the general case of this problem and try to characterize the property of stability under FIFO in terms of network topologies. Such a characterization provides us with the family of network topologies that, under the FIFO protocol, can be made unstable by some adversarial traffic pattern. We show that the property of stability under FIFO is decidable in polynomial time. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.