  This paper considers the problem of throughput optimal routing/scheduling in
a multi-hop constrained queueing network with random connectivity whose special
case includes opportunistic multi-hop wireless networks and input-queued switch
fabrics. The main challenge in the design of throughput optimal routing
policies is closely related to identifying appropriate and universal Lyapunov
functions with negative expected drift. The few well-known throughput optimal
policies in the literature are constructed using simple quadratic or
exponential Lyapunov functions of the queue backlogs and as such they seek to
balance the queue backlogs across network independent of the topology. By
considering a class of continuous, differentiable, and piece-wise quadratic
Lyapunov functions, this paper provides a large class of throughput optimal
routing policies. The proposed class of Lyapunov functions allow for the
routing policy to control the traffic along short paths for a large portion of
state-space while ensuring a negative expected drift. This structure enables
the design of a large class of routing policies. In particular, and in addition
to recovering the throughput optimality of the well known backpressure routing
policy, an opportunistic routing policy with congestion diversity is proved to
be throughput optimal.
