Multistability in queues with retransmission and its relationship with large deviations in branching processes

We demonstrate that the retransmission policy used in networks can lead to a situation in which a system has many pseudostable states. Only one of these states corresponds to high performance of the system; others are undesirable because of their poor performance. The effect can arise even for a Poisson arrival but becomes more probable for highly bursty traffic. We apply methods of the theory of branching processes for investigation of this phenomenon.

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