Any work-conserving policy stabilizes the ring with spatial reuse

Considers a ring network with spatial reuse. Traffic streams may enter and exit the network at any node. The burstiness of each traffic stream is bounded by a deterministic bound. A transmission policy specifies at each time which traffic stream will be transmitted at the outgoing link by each node. The authors provide an upper bound on the asymptotic backlog of the ring that holds for all work-conserving policies and is independent of the initial conditions. This bound remains finite as long as the maximum load of every link is less than one. The latter condition is also necessary for the existence of an asymptotic bound that is independent of the initial conditions