The Impact of Dynamic Adversarial Attacks on the Stability of Heterogeneous Multimedia Networks

Modern large-scale multimedia networks, such as the Internet, are characterised by heterogeneity due to the versatile nature of the communication subsystems they consist of. We focus on heterogeneous networks where individual greedy, contention-resolution protocols are simultaneously running (composed) over different network queues. A question that arises in such settings of multimedia systems concerns the possibility of developing design criteria in order to evaluate performance degradation under dynamic adversarial attacks. A network is stable if the number of packets in its queues remains bounded at all times for any greedy protocol against any adversary of injection rate less than 1. We study stability properties under various compositions of protocols and dynamic adversarial attacks trying to characterise those properties in terms of network topologies for simple-path trajectories. We feel that this study could help on the design and maintenance of trustworthy heterogeneous networks.