The impact of failure management on the stability of communication networks

In this work we deal with communication networks in which links may fail. We propose an adversarial model for describing the traffic pattern occurring in this type of faulty systems and study properties concerning their stability, especially under (nontrivial) underloaded worse-case scenarios. We show that, depending on how the system is organized and prepared to deal with failures, the dynamics of the system change and thus the conditions for stability. We propose three different ways of failure management and study how they influence on the stability of faulty communication networks under the adversarial model proposed. We show that some failure managements can provoke the instability of even very simple networks.