We consider a fluid queue fed by multiple On-Off flows with heavy-tailed
(regularly varying) On periods. Under fairly mild assumptions, we prove that the workload distribution is asymptotically equivalent to that in a reduced system. The reduced system consists of a ``dominant'' subset of the flows, with the original service rate subtracted by the mean rate of the other flows. We describe how a dominant set may be determined from a simple knapsack formulation. The dominant set consists of a ``minimally critical'' set of On-Off flows with regularly varying On periods. In case the dominant set contains just a single On-Off flow, the exact asymptotics for the reduced system follow from known results. For the case of several
On-Off flows, we exploit a powerful intuitive argument to obtain the exact asymptotics. Combined with the reduced-load equivalence, the results for the reduced system provide a characterization of the tail of the workload distribution for a wide range of traffic scenarios.
It is well-known that large deviations of random walks driven by independent and identically distributed heavy-tailed random variables are governed by the so-called principle of one large jump. We note that further subtleties hold for such random walks in the large deviation scale which we call hidden large deviation. We apply this idea in the context of queueing processes with heavy-tailed service times and study approximations of severe congestion times for (buffered) queues. We conclude with simulated examples to verify our results.
In this paper we derive exact large-buffer asymptotics for a two-class Generalized Processor Sharing (GPS) model, under the assumption that the input traffic streams generated by both classes correspond to heavy-tailed Lévy processes. Four scenarios need to be distinguished, which differ in terms of (i)~the level of heavy-tailedness of the driving Lévy processes as well as (ii)~the values of the corresponding mean rates relative to the GPS weights. The derived results are illustrated by two important special cases, in which the queues' inputs are modeled by heavy-tailed compound Poisson proces…
In this paper we study the maximum queue length $M$ (in terms of the number of customers present) in a busy cycle in the M/G/1 queue. Assume that the service times have a logconvex density. For such (heavy-tailed) service-time distributions the Foreground Background service discipline is optimal. This discipline gives service to the customer(s) that have received the least amount of service so far. It is shown that under this discipline $M$ has an exponentially decreasing tail. From the behaviour of $M$ we obtain asymptotics of the maximum queue length $M(t)$ over the interval $(0,t)$ for $t\t…
The asymptotic decay rate of the sojourn time of a customer in the stationary M/G/1 queue under the Foreground Background (FB) service discipline is studied. The FB discipline gives service to those customers that have received the least service so far. We prove that for light-tailed service times the decay rate of the sojourn time is equal to the decay rate of the busy period. It is shown that FB minimises the decay rate in the class of work-conserving disciplines.
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.
We study the asymptotics of the stationary sojourn time Z of a "typical customer" in a tandem of single-server queues. It is shown that, in a certain "intermediate" region of light-tailed service time distributions, Z may take a large value mostly due to a large value of a single service time of one of customers. Arguments used in the paper allow us to obtain also an elementary proof of the logarithmic asymptotics for the tail distribution of the stationary sojourn time in the whole class of light-tailed distributions.
We consider the $Δ_{(i)}/G/1$ queue, in which a a total of $n$ customers independently demand service after an exponential time. We focus on the case of heavy-tailed service times, and assume that the tail of the service time distribution decays like $x^{-α}$, with $α\in (1,2)$. We consider the asymptotic regime in which the population size grows to infinity and establish that the scaled queue length process converges to an α-stable process with a negative quadratic drift. We leverage this asymptotic result to characterize the headstart that is needed to create a long period of activity. This …
We study a general $k$ dimensional infinite server queues process with Markov switching, Poisson arrivals and where the service times are fat tailed with index $α\in (0,1)$. When the arrival rate is sped up by a factor $n^γ$, the transition probabilities of the underlying Markov chain are divided by $n^γ$ and the service times are divided by $n$, we identify two regimes (''fast arrivals'', when $γ>α$, and ''equilibrium'', when $γ=α$) in which we prove that a properly rescaled process converges pointwise in distribution to some limiting process. In a third ''slow arrivals'' regime, $γ<α$, we sh…
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…
In many applications, significant correlations between arrivals of load-generating events make the numerical evaluation of the load of a system a challenging problem. Here, we construct very 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 small relative error. Motivated by statistical analysis, we assume that the service times are 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 distribut…
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 consider the FCFS G/G/n queue in the Halfin-Whitt regime, in the presence of heavy-tailed distributions (i.e. infinite variance). We prove that under minimal assumptions, i.e. only that processing times have finite 1 + epsilon moment and inter-arrival times have finite second moment, the sequence of stationary queue length distributions, normalized by $n^{\frac{1}{2}}$, is tight. All previous tightness results for the stationary queue length required that processing times have finite 2 + epsilon moment. Furthermore, we develop simple and explicit bounds on the stationary queue length in tha…
We obtain asymptotic bounds for the tail distribution of steady-state waiting time in a two server queue where each server processes incoming jobs at a rate equal to the rate of their arrivals (that is, the half-loaded regime). The job sizes are taken to be regularly varying. When the incoming jobs have finite variance, there are basically two types of effects that dominate the tail asymptotics. While the quantitative distinction between these two manifests itself only in the slowly varying components, the two effects arise from qualitatively very different phenomena (arrival of one extremely …
We consider the problem of packet scheduling in single-hop queueing networks, and analyze the impact of heavy-tailed traffic on the performance of Max-Weight scheduling. As a performance metric we use the delay stability of traffic flows: a traffic flow is delay stable if its expected steady-state delay is finite, and delay unstable otherwise. First, we show that a heavy-tailed traffic flow is delay unstable under any scheduling policy. Then, we focus on the celebrated Max-Weight scheduling policy, and show that a light-tailed flow that conflicts with a heavy-tailed flow is also delay unstable…
In this paper, we study the maximum waiting time $\max_{i\leq N}W_i(\cdot)$ in an $N$-server fork-join queue with heavy-tailed services as $N\to\infty$. The service times are the product of two random variables. One random variable has a regularly varying tail probability and is the same among all $N$ servers, and one random variable is Weibull distributed and is independent and identically distributed among all servers. This setup has the physical interpretation that if a job has a large size, then all the subtasks have large sizes, with some variability described by the Weibull-distributed p…
We say that a random variable is $light$-$tailed$ if moments of order $2+ε$ are finite for some $ε>0$; otherwise, we say that it is $heavy$-$tailed$. We study queueing networks that operate under the Max-Weight scheduling policy, for the case where some queues receive heavy-tailed and some receive light-tailed traffic. Queues with light-tailed arrivals are often delay stable (that is, expected queue sizes are uniformly bounded over time) but can also become delay unstable because of resource-sharing with other queues that receive heavy-tailed arrivals. Within this context, and for any given "t…
We investigate the asymptotic behavior of the steady-state queue length distribution under generalized max-weight scheduling in the presence of heavy-tailed traffic. We consider a system consisting of two parallel queues, served by a single server. One of the queues receives heavy-tailed traffic, and the other receives light-tailed traffic. We study the class of throughput optimal max-weight-alpha scheduling policies, and derive an exact asymptotic characterization of the steady-state queue length distributions. In particular, we show that the tail of the light queue distribution is heavier th…
Consider the workload process for a single server queue with deterministic service times in which customers arrive according to a scheduled traffic process. A scheduled arrival sequence is one in which customers are scheduled to arrive at constant interarrival times, but each customer actual arrival time is perturbed from her scheduled arrival time by a random perturbation. In this paper, we consider a critically loaded queue in which the service rate equals the arrival rate. Unlike a queue fed by renewal traffic, this queue can be stable even in the presence of critical loading. We identify a…
We study a single server FIFO queue that offers general service. Each of n customers enter the queue at random time epochs that are inde- pendent and identically distributed. We call this the random scattering traffic model, and the queueing model RS/G/1. We study the workload process associated with the queue in two different settings. First, we present Gaussian process approximations in a high intensity asymptotic scale and characterize the transient distribution of the approximation. Second, we study the rare event paths of the workload by proving a large deviations principle in the same hi…
A "scheduled" arrival process is one in which the n th arrival is scheduled for time n, but instead occurs at a different time. The difference between the scheduled time and the arrival time is called the perturbation. The sequence of perturbations is assumed to be iid. We describe here the behavior of a single server queue fed by such traffic in which the processing times are deterministic. A particular focus is on perturbation with Pareto-like tails but with finite mean. We obtain tail approximations for the steady-state workload in both cases where the queue is critically loaded and under a…
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…
In the study of large scale stochastic networks with resource management, differential equations and mean-field limits are two key techniques. Recent research shows that the expected fraction vector (that is, the tailed probability vector) plays a key role in setting up mean-field differential equations. To further apply the technique of tailed probability vector to deal with resource management of large scale stochastic networks, this paper discusses tailed probabilities in some basic queueing processes including QBD processes, Markov chains of GI/M/1 type and of M/G/1 type, and also provides…
Tail asymptotics of the solution $R$ to a fixpoint problem of type $R =_{st} Q + \sum_1^N R_m$ is derived under heavy-tailed conditions allowing both dependence between $Q$ and $N$ and the tails to be of the same order of magnitude. Similar results are derived for a $K$-class version with applications to multitype branching processes and busy periods in multiclass queues.
Two of the most popular approximations for the distribution of the steady-state waiting time, $W_{\infty}$, of the M/G/1 queue are the so-called heavy-traffic approximation and heavy-tailed asymptotic, respectively. If the traffic intensity, $ρ$, is close to 1 and the processing times have finite variance, the heavy-traffic approximation states that the distribution of $W_{\infty}$ is roughly exponential at scale $O((1-ρ)^{-1})$, while the heavy tailed asymptotic describes power law decay in the tail of the distribution of $W_{\infty}$ for a fixed traffic intensity. In this paper, we assume a …
In this article a special case of an M/G/2-queue is considered, where the two servers are exposed to two types of jobs that are distributed among the servers via a random switch. In this model the asymptotic behaviour of the workload buffer exceedance probabilities for the two single servers/ both servers together/ one (unspecified) server is determined. Hereby one has to distinguish between jobs that are either heavy-tailed or light-tailed. The results are derived via the dual risk model of the studied M/G/2-queue for which the asymptotic behaviour of different ruin probabilities is determine…
Infinite server queues have ultimate processing power to accommodate explosive demand surges. We provide a new stability criterion based on the Borel-Cantelli lemma to judge whether the infinite server safely accommodates heavy-tailed demands. We illustrate the battles between heavy-tailed demand and infinite servers in detail. In particular, we show some cases where the explosive demand overwhelms the infinite server queue. The medical demand caused by pandemics such as the COVID- 19 creates huge stress to the healthcare system. This framework indicates that healthcare systems need to account…
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…
This paper considers a Lévy-driven queue (i.e., a Lévy process reflected at 0), and focuses on the distribution of $M(t)$, that is, the minimal value attained in an interval of length $t$ (where it is assumed that the queue is in stationarity at the beginning of the interval). The first contribution is an explicit characterization of this distribution, in terms of Laplace transforms, for spectrally one-sided Lévy processes (i.e., either only positive jumps or only negative jumps). The second contribution concerns the asymptotics of $\prob{M(T_u)> u}$ (for different classes of functions $T_u$ a…
When an explicit expression for a probability distribution function $F(x)$ can not be found, asymptotic properties of the tail probability function $\bar{F}(x)=1-F(x)$ are very valuable, since they provide approximations or bounds for system performance, and approaches for computing probability distribution. In this paper, we study tail asymptotic properties for the number of the customers in the $M/G/1$ retrial queueing system. For queueing systems, studies on asymptotic tails have mainly concentrated on the first order asymptotic behavior. To best our knowledge, there is no second order tail…
We calculate asymptotics of the distribution of the number of customers in orbit in a two-class priority retrial $M/G/1$-type queueing model. In this model, priority customers wait in line while non-priority customers join an orbit and retry later. Although the generating function and moments of the number of customers in orbit has been analyzed before, asymptotics of the distribution have not been thoroughly investigated. We use singularity analysis of the probability generating function to do just that. Our results show that different regimes exist for these asymptotics in case of light-tail…
This paper studies the asymptotic behavior of the steady-state waiting time, W_infty, of the M/G/1 queue with subexponenential processing times for different combinations of traffic intensities and overflow levels. In particular, we provide insights into the regions of large deviations where the so-called heavy traffic approximation and heavy tail asymptotic hold. For queues whose service time distribution decays slower than e^{-sqrt{t}} we identify a third region of asymptotics where neither the heavy traffic nor the heavy tailed approximations are valid. These results are obtained by derivin…
We consider a modulated process S which, conditional on a background process X, has independent increments. Assuming that S drifts to -infinity and that its increments (jumps) are heavy-tailed (in a sense made precise in the paper), we exhibit natural conditions under which the asymptotics of the tail distribution of the overall maximum of S can be computed. We present results in discrete and in continuous time. In particular, in the absence of modulation, the process S in continuous time reduces to a Levy process with heavy-tailed Levy measure. A central point of the paper is that we make ful…
We consider the single server queue with service in random order. For a large class of heavy-tailed service time distributions, we determine the asymptotic behavior of the waiting time distribution. For the special case of Poisson arrivals and regularly varying service time distribution with index -ν, it is shown that the waiting time distribution is also regularly varying, with index 1 -ν, and the pre-factor is determined explicitly. Another contribution of the paper is the heavy-traffic analysis of the waiting time distribution in the M/G/1 case. We consider not only the case of finite servi…
A network belongs to the monotone separable class if its state variables are homogeneous and monotone functions of the epochs of the arrival process. This framework contains several classical queueing network models, including generalized Jackson networks, max-plus networks, polling systems, multiserver queues, and various classes of stochastic Petri nets. We use comparison relationships between networks of this class with i.i.d. driving sequences and the $GI /GI /1/1$ queue to obtain the tail asymptotics of the stationary maximal dater under light-tailed assumptions for service times. The exp…
Distributions with a heavy tail are difficult to estimate. If the design of a scheduling policy is sensitive to the details of heavy tail distributions of the service times, an approximately optimal solution is difficult to obtain. This paper shows that the optimal scheduling of an M/G/1 queue with heavy tailed service times does not present this difficulty and that an approximately optimal strategy can be derived by truncating the distributions.
We consider a system of N queues with decentralized load balancing such as power-of-D strategies(where D may depend on N) and generic scheduling disciplines. To measure the dependence of the queues, we use the clan of ancestors, a technique coming from interacting particle systems. Relying in that analysis we prove quantitative estimates on the queues correlations implying propagation of chaos for systems with Markovian arrivals and general service time distribution. This solves the conjecture posed by Bramsom et. al. in [*] concerning the asymptotic independence of the servers in the case of …
In this paper we revisit the Markovian queueing system with a single server, infinite capacity queue and the special queue skipping policy. Customers arrive in batches, but are served one by one according to any conservative discipline. The size of the arriving batch becomes known upon its arrival and at any time instant the total number of customers in the system is also known. According to the adopted queue skipping policy if a batch, which size is greater than the current system size, arrives to the system, all current customers in the system are removed from it and the new batch is placed …
This paper addresses the analysis of the queue-length process of single-server queues under overdispersion, i.e., queues fed by an arrival process for which the variance of the number of arrivals in a given time window exceeds the corresponding mean. Several variants are considered, using concepts as mixing and Markov modulation, resulting in different models with either endogenously triggered or exogenously triggered random environments. Only in special cases explicit expressions can be obtained, e.g. when the random arrival and/or service rate can attain just finitely many values. While for …
We propose a class of strongly efficient rare event simulation estimators for random walks and compound Poisson processes with a regularly varying increment/jump-size distribution in a general large deviations regime. Our estimator is based on an importance sampling strategy that hinges on the heavy-tailed sample path large deviations result recently established in Rhee, Blanchet, and Zwart (2016). The new estimators are straightforward to implement and can be used to systematically evaluate the probability of a wide range of rare events with bounded relative error. They are "universal" in the…
In Internet environment, traffic flow to a link is typically modeled by superposition of ON/OFF based sources. During each ON-period for a particular source, packets arrive according to a Poisson process and packet sizes (hence service times) can be generally distributed. In this paper, we establish heavy traffic limit theorems to provide suitable approximations for the system under first-in first-out (FIFO) and work conserving service discipline, which state that, when the lengths of both ON- and OFF-periods are lightly tailed, the sequences of the scaled queue length and workload processes c…
In this paper we consider a ring of $N\ge 1$ queues served by a single server in a cyclic order. After having served a queue (according to a service discipline that may vary from queue to queue), there is a switch-over period and then the server serves the next queue and so forth. This model is known in the literature as a \textit{polling model}. Each of the queues is fed by a non-decreasing Lévy process, which can be different during each of the consecutive periods within the server's cycle. The $N$-dimensional Lévy processes obtained in this fashion are described by their (joint) Laplace exp…
This paper introduces a new asymptotic regime for simplifying stochastic models having non-stationary effects, such as those that arise in the presence of time-of-day effects. This regime describes an operating environment within which the arrival process to a service system has an arrival intensity that is fluctuating rapidly. We show that such a service system is well approximated by the corresponding model in which the arrival process is Poisson with a constant arrival rate. In addition to the basic weak convergence theorem, we also establish a first order correction for the distribution of…
We study the tail asymptotic of the stationary joint queue length distribution for a generalized Jackson network (GJN for short), assuming its stability. For the two station case, this problem has been recently solved in the logarithmic sense for the marginal stationary distributions under the setting that arrival processes and service times are of phase-type. In this paper, we study similar tail asymptotic problems on the stationary distribution, but problems and assumptions are different. First, the asymptotics are studied not only for the marginal distribution but also the stationary probab…
We study the exact asymptotics for the distribution of the first time $τ_x$ a Lévy process $X_t$ crosses a negative level $-x$. We prove that $\mathbf P(τ_x>t)\sim V(x)\mathbf P(X_t\ge 0)/t$ as $t\to\infty$ for a certain function $V(x)$. Using known results for the large deviations of random walks we obtain asymptotics for $\mathbf P(τ_x>t)$ explicitly in both light and heavy tailed cases. We also apply our results to find asymptotics for the distribution of the busy period in an M/G/1 queue.
