Stability of heterogeneous multimedia networks against adversarial attacks

A distinguishing feature of today´s large-scale platforms for multimedia distribution and communication, such as the Internet, is their heterogeneity, predominantly manifested by the fact that a variety of communication protocols are simultaneously running over different hosts. A question that arises in such settings of multimedia systems concerns the presence (or not) of stability properties when greedy, contention-resolution protocols are composed in a multimedia packet-switched network. A network is stable under a greedy protocol (or a composition of protocols) if, for any adversary of injection rate less than 1, the number of packets in the network remains bounded at all times. We study stability under various compositions of contention-resolution protocols and different packet trajectories trying to characterize this property in terms of network topologies. Such a characterization provides us with the family of network topologies that, under specific compositions of protocols, can be made unstable by some adversarial traffic pattern.