Properties of optimal hop-by-hop allocation policies in networks with multiple transmitters and linear equal holding costs

Flow control between one receiving node and its adjacent transmitting nodes in a computer network is modeled as a Markov decision problem. By deriving several qualitative properties of an optimal allocation policy, it is shown that finding dynamic optimal allocations for only T states suffices to completely describe an optimal allocation policy. When the number of transmitters M=2, for all but one of the T states there are only two allocations that are candidates for optimality. It is desirable to extend this property to M>2. However, it appears that the technique used for M=2 does not generalize to M>2. >