Bounds Implied by Drift with Applications

A recurring theme in the design of control schemes for computer communication networks has been to identify the drift of critical quantities such as queue lengths, and then devise control strategies that close the loop. A useful tool for the performance analysis of such strategies are bounds on deviations from the expected trajectory. This talk identifies an incomplete list of such tools that have been used in a broad class of applications, for both stochastic and deterministically constrained models of load.