On the Capacity Requirement for Arbitrary End-to-End Deadline and Reliability Guarantees in Multi-hop Networks

It has been shown that it is impossible to achieve both stringent end-to-end deadline and reliability guarantees in a large network without having complete information of all future packet arrivals. In order to maintain desirable performance in the presence of uncertainty of future packet arrivals, common practice is to add redundancy by increasing link capacities. This paper studies the amount of capacity needed to provide stringent performance guarantees and propose a low-complexity online algorithm. Without adding redundancy, we further propose a low-complexity order-optimal online policy for the network.