Any work-conserving policy stabilizes the ring with spatial re-use

We consider the ring network with spatial reuse. Traffic streams may enter and exit the network at any node. We adopt an arrival traffic model with deterministic constraints on its sample paths, which conforms to the output traffic of a leaky bucket rate control mechanism. A transmission policy specifies each time at which the traffic stream will be transmitted at the outgoing link by each node. We 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