Delayed and Network Queues

Preface

Queueing theory is considered a part of Operations Research, in which the concept of stochastic processes is widely applied. With advancements in manufacturing and production systems, public transportation, logistics, and health care, in this era of technological development made possible by wireless communication and the Internet, performance evaluation of such systems is best accomplished by modeling the system as a network of queues. A network of queues is applied to model a real-world system when a set of resources is shared by some components of the system. Thus, queueing network modeling is a methodology for the analysis of systems such as computer systems. Many examples of networks of queues that appear in our day-to-day lives sometimes go unnoticed. The assembly of an automobile in a car manufacturing plant is a simple example.

In the 1960s, the computer industry was not very aware of the need of queueing network analysis; instead, the time sharing idea was used in the data processing industry. The networks only became fashionable by the end of that decade. New challenges developed in the 1970s and continued when the wireless communication system was studied in the 1980s and has still continued to the present time. By now, the algorithms for evaluating queueing network models are well developed and the mathematical sophistication to analyze systems such as computer systems is not so essential.

However, for long, the networks were based on the assumption of reliable ...