The fluid model has proven to be one of the most effective tools for the analysis of stochastic queueing networks, specifically for the analysis of stability. It is known that stability of a fluid model implies positive (Harris) recurrence (stability) of a corresponding stochastic queueing network, and weak stability implies rate stability of a corresponding stochastic network. These results have been established both for cases of specific scheduling policies and for the class of all work conserving policies.
However, only partial converse results have been established and in certain cases converse statements do not hold. In this paper we close one of the existing gaps. For the case of networks with two stations we prove that if the fluid model is not weakly stable under the class of all work conserving policies, then a corresponding queueing network is not rate stable under the class of all work conserving policies. We establish the result by building a particular work conserving scheduling policy which makes the associated stochastic process transient. An important corollary of our result is that the condition $ρ^*\leq 1$, which was proven in \cite{daivan97} to be the exact condition for global weak stability of the fluid model, is also the exact global rate stability condition for an associated queueing network. Here $ρ^*$ is a certain computable parameter of the network involving virtual station and push start conditions.
We study the stability of single server retrial queues under general distribution for retrial times and stationary ergodic service times, for three main retrial policies studied in the literature: classical linear, constant and control policies. The approach used is the renovating events approach to obtain sufficient stability conditions by strong coupling convergence of the process modeling the dynamics of the system to a unique stationary ergodic regime. We also obtain instability conditions by convergence in distribution to improper limiting sequences.
This paper addresses the question when the underlying Markov process of a multiclass queueing network is positive Harris recurrent. It is well-known that stability of the fluid limit model is a sufficient condition for this. Hence, stability of fluid (limit) models is of vital interest. Recently, it has been shown that if the fluid model satisfies certain properties, it is stable if and only if there exists a Lyapunov function. In this paper a new method is provided to conclude that the underlying Markov process is positive Harris recurrent if the fluid model is stable by using explicitly the …
In this paper, we consider queueing systems where the dynamics are non-stationary and state-dependent. For performance analysis of these systems, fluid and diffusion models have been typically used. Although they are proven to be asymptotically exact, their effectiveness as approximations in the non-asymptotic regime needs to be investigated. We find that existing fluid and diffusion approximations might be either inaccurate under simplifying assumptions or computationally intractable. To address this concern, this paper focuses on developing a methodology based on adjusting the fluid model so…
Under the last-in, first-out (LIFO) discipline, jobs arriving later at a class always receive priority of service over earlier arrivals at any class belonging to the same station. Subcritical LIFO queueing networks with Poisson external arrivals are known to be stable, but an open problem has been whether this is also the case when external arrivals are given by renewal processes. Here, we show that this weaker assumption is not sufficient for stability by constructing a family of examples where the number of jobs in the network increases to infinity over time. This behavior contrasts with tha…
We analyze the behavior of closed product-form queueing networks when the number of customers grows to infinity and remains proportionate on each route (or class). First, we focus on the stationary behavior and prove the conjecture that the stationary distribution at non-bottleneck queues converges weakly to the stationary distribution of an ergodic, open product-form queueing network. This open network is obtained by replacing bottleneck queues with per-route Poissonian sources whose rates are determined by the solution of a strictly concave optimization problem. Then, we focus on the transie…
One of the key performance measures in queueing systems is the exponential decay rate of the steady-state tail probabilities of the queue lengths. It is known that if a corresponding fluid model is stable and the stochastic primitives have finite moments, then the queue lengths also have finite moments, so that the tail probability \pr(\cdot >s) decays faster than s^{-n} for any n. It is natural to conjecture that the decay rate is in fact exponential. In this paper an example is constructed to demonstrate that this conjecture is false. For a specific stationary policy applied to a network wit…
We study a system, where a random flow of customers is served by servers (called agents) invited on-demand. Each invited agent arrives into the system after a random time; after each service completion, an agent returns to the system or leaves it with some fixed probabilities. Customers and/or agents may be impatient, that is, while waiting in queue, they leave the system at a certain rate (which may be zero). We consider the queue-length-based feedback scheme, which controls the number of pending agent invitations, depending on the customer and agent queue lengths and their changes. The basic…
The tandem fluid queueing model is a useful tool for performance analysis and control design for a variety of transportation systems. In this article, we study the joint impact of stochastic capacity and spillback on the long-time properties of this model. Our analysis focuses on the system of two fluid queueing links in series. The upstream link has a constant capacity (saturation rate) and an infinite buffer size. The downstream link has a stochastic capacity and a finite buffer size. Queue spillback occurs when the the downstream link is full. We derive a necessary condition and a sufficien…
Many real life queueing networks have finite buffers with overflows. To understand the behavior of such networks, we consider traffic equations that generalize the traffic equations of classic open queueing networks where some nodes are potentially overloaded. We present a novel, efficient algorithm for solving the equations for overflow networks together with a sufficient condition for existence and uniqueness of solutions. Our analysis also sharpens results of traffic equations for classic open queueing networks.
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…
In this paper, we consider a Lévy-driven fluid queueing system where the server may subject to breakdowns and repairs. In addition, the server will leave for a vacation each time when he finds an empty system. We cast the queueing process as a Lévy process modified to have random jumps at two classes of stopping times. By using the Kella-Whitt martingale method, we obtain the limiting distribution of the virtual waiting time process. Moreover, we investigate the busy period, the correlation structure and the stochastic decomposition properties. These results may be generalized to Lévy processe…
This paper considers a closed queueing network model of ridesharing systems such as Didi Chuxing, Lyft, and Uber. We focus on empty-car routing, a mechanism by which we control car flow in the network to optimize system-wide utility functions, e.g. the availability of empty cars when a passenger arrives. We establish both process-level and steady-state convergence of the queueing network to a fluid limit in a large market regime where demand for rides and supply of cars tend to infinity, and use this limit to study a fluid-based optimization problem. We prove that the optimal network utility o…
Fluid limit techniques have become a central tool to analyze queueing networks over the last decade, with applications to performance analysis, simulation and optimization. In this paper, some of these techniques are extended to a general class of skip-free Markov chains. As in the case of queueing models, a fluid approximation is obtained by scaling time, space and the initial condition by a large constant. The resulting fluid limit is the solution of an ordinary differential equation (ODE) in ``most'' of the state space. Stability and finer ergodic properties for the stochastic model then fo…
We consider a two-node fluid network with batch arrivals of random size having a heavy-tailed distribution. We are interested in the tail asymptotics for the stationary distribution of a two-dimensional queue-length process. The tail asymptotics have been well studied for two-dimensional reflecting processes where jumps have either a bounded or an unbounded light-tailed distribution. However, presence of heavy tails totally changes the asymptotics. Here we focus on the case of strong stability where both nodes release fluid with sufficiently high speeds to minimise their mutual influence. We s…
We introduce a multiclass single-server queueing system in which the arrival rates depend on the current job in service. The system is characterized by a matrix of arrival rates in lieu of a vector of arrival rates. Our proposed model departs from existing state-dependent queueing models in which the parameters depend primarily on the number of jobs in the system rather than on the job in service. We formulate the queueing model and its corresponding fluid model and proceed to obtain the necessary and sufficient conditions for stability via fluid models. Utilizing the natural connection with t…
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…
Consider a switched queueing network with general routing among its queues. The MaxWeight policy assigns available service by maximizing the objective function $\sum_j Q_j σ_j$ among the different feasible service options, where $Q_j$ denotes queue size and $σ_j$ 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; M…
A matching queue is described via a graph $G$ together with a matching policy. Specifically, to each node in the graph there is a corresponding arrival process of items which can either be queued, or matched with queued items in neighboring nodes. The matching policy specifies how items are matched whenever more than one matching is possible. Motivated by the increasing theoretical interest in such matching models, we investigate the question of (in)stability of matching queues which satisfy a natural necessary condition for stability, which can be thought of as an analogue of the usual traffi…
Bandwidth-sharing networks as introduced by Massoulié & Roberts (1998) model the dynamic interaction among an evolving population of elastic flows competing for several links. With policies based on optimization procedures, such models are of interest both from a Queueing Theory and Operations Research perspective. In the present paper, we focus on bandwidth-sharing networks with capacities and arrival rates of a large order of magnitude compared to transfer rates of individual flows. This regime is standard in practice. In particular, we extend previous work by Reed & Zwart (2010) on fluid ap…
