Papers › Stability and Instability of the MaxWeight Policy
Stability and Instability of the MaxWeight Policy
Maury Bramson, Bernardo D'Auria, Neil Walton
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Consider a switched queueing network with general routing among its queues. The MaxWeight policy assigns available service by maximizing the objective function ∑ⱼ Qⱼ σⱼ among the different feasible service options, where Qⱼ denotes queue size and σⱼ denotes the amount of service to be executed at queue j. MaxWeight is a greedy policy that does not depend on knowledge of arrival rates and is straightforward to implement. These properties, as well as its simple formulation, suggest MaxWeight as a serious candidate for implementation in the setting of switched queueing networks; MaxWeight has been extensively studied in the context of communication networks. However, a fluid model variant of MaxWeight was shown by Andrews--Zhang (2003) not to be maximally stable. Here, we prove that MaxWeight itself is not in general maximally stable. We also prove MaxWeight is maximally stable in a much more restrictive setting, and that a weighted version of MaxWeight, where the weighting depends on the traffic intensity, is always stable.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections