Nonuniform traffic in the Manhattan street network

The Manhattan Street Network is a toroidal network proposed for application as a Metropolitan Area Network. The network uses deflection routing, an adaptive routing scheme where nodes attempt to send packets along shortest paths to their destinations. Contention for communication link access is resolved by forcing packets to travel longer paths. We consider a network operating with deflection routing and nonuniform traffic. In addition, each communication link may be characterized by an arbitrary but known propagation delay. We study a contention resolution rule giving priority to packets in the network longest. Independence approximations are used to describe the distribution of packet arrivals at each node, and we derive approximate steady-state packet delay distributions. Examples are presented and compared to simulation results, and the independence assumption is discussed.