Multi-class queueing networks (McQNs) extend the classical concept of Jackson network by allowing jobs of different classes to visit the same server. While such a generalization seems rather natural, from a structural perspective there is a significant gap between the two concepts. Nice analytical features of Jackson networks, such as stability conditions, product-form equilibrium distributions, and stochastic monotonicity do not immediately carry over to the multi-class framework. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on this structural gap, focusing on monotonicity properties. To this end, we introduce and study a class of Markov processes, which we call \emph{Q-processes}, modeling the time evolution of the network configuration of any open, work-conservative McQN having exponential service times and {Poisson input}. We define a new monotonicity notion tailored for this class of processes. Our main result is that we show monotonicity for a large class of McQN models, covering virtually all instances of practical interest. This leads to interesting properties which are commonly encountered for `traditional' queueing processes, such as (i)~monotonicity with respect to external arrival rates and (ii)~star-convexity of the stability region (with respect to the external arrival rates); such properties are well known for Jackson networks, but had not been established at this level of generality. This research was partly motivated by the recent development of a simulation-based method which allows one to numerically determine the stability region of a McQN parametrized in terms of the arrival rates vector.
In this note, a general approach to the study of non-stationary Markov chains with catastrophes and the corresponding queuing models is considered, as well as to obtain estimates of the limiting regime itself. As an illustration, an example of a queuing model is studied.
Queueing networks are notoriously difficult to analyze sans both Markovian and stationarity assumptions. Much of the theoretical contribution towards performance analysis of time-inhomogeneous single class queueing networks has focused on Markovian networks, with the recent exception of work in Liu and Whitt (2011) and Mandelbaum and Ramanan (2010). In this paper, we introduce transitory queueing networks as a model of inhomogeneous queueing networks, where a large, but finite, number of jobs arrive at queues in the network over a fixed time horizon. The queues offer FIFO service, and we assum…
We develop accurate approximations of the delay distribution of the MArP/G/1 queue that cap- ture the exact tail behavior and provide bounded relative errors. Motivated by statistical analysis, we consider the service times as a mixture of a phase-type and a heavy-tailed distribution. With the aid of perturbation analysis, we derive corrected phase-type approximations as a sum of the delay in an MArP/PH/1 queue and a heavy-tailed component depending on the perturbation parameter. We exhibit their performance with numerical examples.
Significant correlations between arrivals of load-generating events make the numerical evaluation of the workload of a system a challenging problem. In this paper, we construct highly accurate approximations of the workload distribution of the MAP/G/1 queue that capture the tail behavior of the exact workload distribution and provide a bounded relative error. Motivated by statistical analysis, we consider the service times as a mixture of a phase-type and a heavy-tailed distribution. With the aid of perturbation analysis, we derive our approximations as a sum of the workload distribution of th…
We consider a Markovian single-server retrial queueing system with a constant retrial rate. Conditions of null ergodicity and exponential ergodicity for the correspondent process, as well as bounds on the rate of convergence are obtained.
The Multi-class Queueing Network (McQN) arises as a natural multi-class extension of the traditional (single-class) Jackson network. In a single-class network subcriticality (i.e. subunitary nominal workload at every station) entails stability, but this is no longer sufficient when jobs/customers of different classes (i.e. with different service requirements and/or routing scheme) visit the same server; therefore, analytical conditions for stability of McQNs are lacking, in general. In this note we design a numerical (simulation-based) method for determining the stability region of a McQN, in …
This paper considers the tail asymptotics for a cumulative process $\{B(t); t \ge 0\}$ sampled at a heavy-tailed random time $T$. The main contribution of this paper is to establish several sufficient conditions for the asymptotic equality ${\sf P}(B(T) > bx) \sim {\sf P}(M(T) > bx) \sim {\sf P}(T>x)$ as $x \to \infty$, where $M(t) = \sup_{0 \le u \le t}B(u)$ and $b$ is a certain positive constant. The main results of this paper can be used to obtain the subexponential asymptotics for various queueing models in Markovian environments. As an example, using the main results, we derive subexponen…
Based on the covert communication framework, we consider a covert queueing problem that has a Markovian statistic. Willie jobs arrive according to a Poisson process and require service from server Bob. Bob does not have a queue for jobs to wait and hence when the server is busy, arriving Willie jobs are lost. Willie and Bob enter a contract under which Bob should only serve Willie jobs. As part of the usage statistic, for a sequence of N consecutive jobs that arrived, Bob informs Willie whether each job was served or lost (this is the Markovian statistic). Bob is assumed to be violating the co…
This paper develops tools to obtain robust probabilistic estimates for queueing models at the large deviations (LD) scale. These tools are based on the recently introduced robust Rényi bounds, which provide LD estimates (and more generally risk-sensitive (RS) cost estimates) that hold uniformly over an uncertainty class of models, provided that the class is defined in terms of Rényi divergence with respect to a reference model and that estimates are available for the reference model. One very attractive quality of the approach is that the class to which the estimates apply may consist of hard …
Discrete-time queueing models find huge applications as they are used in modeling queueing systems arising in digital platforms like telecommunication systems, computer networks, etc. In this paper, we analyze an infinite-buffer queueing model with discrete Markovian arrival process. The units on arrival are served in batches by a single server according to the general bulk-service rule, and the service time follows general distribution with service rate depending on the size of the batch being served. We mathematically formulate the model using the supplementary variable technique and obtain …
We establish heavy traffic limit theorems for queue-length processes in critically loaded single class queueing networks with state dependent arrival and service rates. A distinguishing feature of our model is non-Markovian state dependence. The limit stochastic process is a continuous-path reflected process on the nonnegative orthant. We give an application to generalised Jackson networks with state-dependent rates.
We consider an $M/M/1$ queueing system with impatient customers with multiple and single vacations. It is assumed that customers are impatient whenever the state of the server. We derive the probability generating functions of the number of customers in the system and we obtain some performance measures.
We consider Markov processes, which describe e.g. queueing network processes, in a random environment which influences the network by determining random breakdown of nodes, and the necessity of repair thereafter. Starting from an explicit steady state distribution of product form available in the literature, we notice that this steady state distribution does not provide information about the correlation structure in time and space (over nodes). We study this correlation structure via one step correlations for the queueing-environment process. Although formulas for absolute values of these corr…
We introduce a rate balance principle for general (not necessarily Markovian) stochastic processes. Special attention is given to processes with birth and death like transitions, for which it is shown that for any state $i$, the rate of two consecutive transitions from $i-1$ to $i+1$, coincides with the corresponding rate from $i+1$ to $i-1$. This observation appears to be useful in deriving well-known, as well as new, results for the Mn/Gn/1 and G/Mn/1 queueing systems, such as a recursion on the conditional distributions of the residual service times (in the former model) and of the residual…
As a favorite urban public transport mode, the bike sharing system is a large-scale and complicated system, and there exists a key requirement that a user and a bike should be matched sufficiently in time. Such matched behavior makes analysis of the bike sharing systems more difficult and challenging. This paper considers a more general large-scale bike sharing system from two important views: (a) Bikes move in an irreducible path graph, which is related to geographical structure of the bike sharing system; and (b) Markovian arrival processes (MAPs) are applied to describe the non-Poisson and …
This paper considers a parallel system of queues fed by independent arrival streams, where the service rate of each queue depends on the number of customers in all of the queues. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the stability of the system are derived, based on stochastic monotonicity and marginal drift properties of multiclass birth and death processes. These conditions yield a sharp characterization of stability for systems, where the service rate of each queue is decreasing in the number of customers in other queues, and has uniform limits as the queue lengths tend to infinity. The r…
Motivated by a risk process with positive and negative premium rates, we consider a real-valued Markov additive process with finitely many background states. This additive process linearly increases or decreases while the background state is unchanged, and may have upward jumps at the transition instants of the background state. It is known that the hitting probabilities of this additive process at lower levels have a matrix exponential form. We here study the hitting probabilities at upper levels, which do not have a matrix exponential form in general. These probabilities give the ruin probab…
Hawkes process is a class of simple point processes that is self-exciting and has clustering effect. The intensity of this point process depends on its entire past history. It has wide applications in finance, insurance, neuroscience, social networks, criminology, seismology, and many other fields. In this paper, we study linear Hawkes process with an exponential kernel in the asymptotic regime where the initial intensity of the Hawkes process is large. We establish large deviations for Hawkes processes in this regime as well as the regime when both the initial intensity and the time are large…
We establish the existence (and in an appropriate sense uniqueness) of Markovian solutions for ergodic BSDEs under a novel monotonicity condition. Our monotonicity condition allows us to prove existence even when the driver f has arbitrary (in particular super-quadratic) growth in z, which reveals an interesting trade-off between monotonicity and growth for ergodic BSDEs. The technique of proof is to establish a probabilistic representation of the derivative of the Markovian solution, and then use this representation to obtain a-priori estimates. Our study is motivated by applications to ergod…
In this paper we study a non-stationary Markovian queueing model of a two-processor heterogeneous system with time-varying arrival and service rates. We obtain the bounds on the rate of convergence and find the main limiting characteristics of the queue-length process.
Let $\{\boldsymbol{X}_n\}$ be a discrete-time $d$-dimensional process on $\mathbb{Z}_+^d$ with a supplemental (background) process $\{J_n\}$ on a finite set and assume the joint process $\{\boldsymbol{Y}_n\}=\{(\boldsymbol{X}_n,J_n)\}$ to be Markovian. Then, the process $\{\boldsymbol{X}_n\}$ can be regarded as a kind of reflecting random walk (RRW for short) in which the transition probabilities of the RRW are modulated according to the state of the background process $\{J_n\}$; we assume this modulation is space-homogeneous inside $\mathbb{Z}_+^d$ and on each boundary face of $\mathbb{Z}_+^d…
We consider queueing output processes of some elementary queueing models such as the M/M/1/K queue and the M/G/1 queue. An important performance measure for these counting processes is their variance curve, indicating the variance of the number of served customers over a time interval. Recent work has revealed some non-trivial properties dealing with the asymptotic rate at which the variance curve grows. In this paper we add to the results by finding explicit expressions for the second order approximation of the variance curve, namely the y-intercept of the linear asymptote. For M/M/1/K queues…
We develop a robust queueing network analyzer algorithm to approximate the steady-state performance of a single-class open queueing network of single-server queues with Markovian routing. The algorithm allows non-renewal external arrival processes, general service-time distributions and customer feedback. We focus on the customer flows, defined as the continuous-time processes counting customers flowing into or out of the network, or flowing from one queue to another. Each flow is partially characterized by its rate and a continuous function that measures the stochastic variability over time. …
Marcel F. Neuts opened a key door in numerical computation of stochastic models by means of phase-type (PH) distributions and Markovian arrival processes (MAPs). To celebrate his 75th birthday, this paper reports a more general framework of Markovian supermarket models, including a system of differential equations for the fraction measure and a system of nonlinear equations for the fixed point. To understand this framework heuristically, this paper gives a detailed analysis for three important supermarket examples: M/G/1 type, GI/M/1 type and multiple choices, explains how to derive the system…
In this work, we focus on the stationary analysis of a specific class of continuous time Markov-modulated reflected random walks in the quarter plane with applications in the modelling of two-node Markov-modulated queueing networks with coupled queues. The transition rates of the two-dimensional process depend on the state of a finite state Markovian background process. Such a modulation is space homogeneous in the set of inner states of the two-dimensional lattice but may be different in the set of states at its boundaries. To obtain the stationary distribution, we apply the power series appr…
Robust estimates for the performance of complicated queueing networks can be obtained by showing that the number of jobs in the network is stochastically comparable to a simpler, analytically tractable reference network. Classical coupling results on stochastic ordering of network populations require strong monotonicity assumptions which are often violated in practice. However, in most real-world applications we care more about what goes through a network than what sits inside it. This paper describes a new approach for ordering flows instead of populations by augmenting network states with th…
Stochastic models for performance analysis, optimization and control of queues hinge on a multitude of alternatives for input point processes. In case of bursty traffic, one very popular model is the \textit{Markov Modulated Poisson Process} (MMPP), however it is not the only option. Here, we introduce an alternative that we call \textit{Markovian transition counting process} (MTCP). The latter is a point process counting the number of transitions of a finite continuous-time Markov chain. For a given MTCP one can establish an MMPP with the same first and second moments of counts. In this paper…
We introduce a "system-wide safety staffing" (SWSS) parameter for multiclass multi-pool networks of any tree topology, Markovian or non-Markovian, in the Halfin-Whitt regime. This parameter can be regarded as the optimal reallocation of the capacity fluctuations (positive or negative) of order $\sqrt{n}$ when each server pool employs a square-root staffing rule. We provide an explicit form of the SWSS as a function of the system parameters, which is derived using a graph theoretic approach based on Gaussian elimination. For Markovian networks, we give an equivalent characterization of the SWSS…
Cator and Van Mieghem [Cator E, Van Mieghem P., Phys. Rev. E 89, 052802 (2014)] stated that the correlation of infection at the same time between any pair of nodes in a network is non-negative for the Markovian SIS and SIR epidemic models. The arguments used to obtain this result rely strongly on the graphical construction of the stochastic process, as well as the FKG inequality. In this note we show that although the approach used by the authors applies to the SIS model, it cannot be used for the SIR model as stated in their work. In particular, we observe that monotonicity in the process is …
It was recently proven that the correlation function of the stationary version of a reflected Lévy process is nonnegative, nonincreasing and convex. In another branch of the literature it was established that the mean value of the reflected process starting from zero is nonnegative, nondecreasing and concave. In the present paper it is shown, by putting them in a common framework, that these results extend to substantially more general settings. Indeed, instead of reflected Lévy processes, we consider a class of more general stochastically monotone Markov processes. In this setup we show monot…
A broad class of parallel server systems is considered, for which we prove the steady-state asymptotic independence of server workloads, as the number of servers goes to infinity, while the system load remains sub-critical. Arriving jobs consist of multiple components. There are multiple job classes, and each class may be of one of two types, which determines the rule according to which the job components add workloads to the servers. The model is broad enough to include as special cases some popular queueing models with redundancy, such as cancel-on-start and cancel-on-completion redundancy. …
We iteratively derive the product-form solutions of stationary distributions of priority multiclass queueing networks with multi-sever stations. The networks are Markovian with exponential interarrival and service time distributions. These solutions can be used to conduct performance analysis or as comparison criteria for approximation and simulation studies of large scale networks with multi-processor shared-memory switches and cloud computing systems with parallel-server stations. Numerical comparisons with existing Brownian approximating model are provided to indicate the effectiveness of o…
This paper considers a simulation-based estimator for a general class of Markovian processes and explores some strong consistency properties of the estimator. The estimation problem is defined over a continuum of invariant distributions indexed by a vector of parameters. A key step in the method of proof is to show the uniform convergence (a.s.) of a family of sample distributions over the domain of parameters. This uniform convergence holds under mild continuity and monotonicity conditions on the dynamic process. The estimator is applied to an asset pricing model with technology adoption. A c…
This paper studies stochastic games on large graphs and their graphon limits. We propose a new formulation of graphon games based on a single typical player's label-state distribution. In contrast, other recently proposed models of graphon games work directly with a continuum of players, which involves serious measure-theoretic technicalities. In fact, by viewing the label as a component of the state process, we show in our formulation that graphon games are a special case of mean field games, albeit with certain inevitable degeneracies and discontinuities that make most existing results on me…
We prove a many-server heavy-traffic fluid limit for an overloaded Markovian queueing system having two customer classes and two service pools, known in the call-center literature as the X model. The system uses the fixed-queue-ratio-with-thresholds (FQR-T) control, which we proposed in a recent paper as a way for one service system to help another in face of an unexpected overload. Under FQR-T, customers are served by their own service pool until a threshold is exceeded. Then, one-way sharing is activated with customers from one class allowed to be served in both pools. After the control is a…
