2004/11/01 by Dirk P. Kroese, D. P. Kroese, W. R. W. Scheinhardt +3
Business, Management and Accounting · Decision Sciences · Mathematics · #Advanced Queuing Theory Analysis #Probability and Risk Models #Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics #math.PR #msc:60J27
paper · pdf · doi:10.1214/105051604000000477
published as Annals of Applied Probability 2004, Vol. 14, No. 4, 2057-2089 · Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/105051604000000477 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)
openalex publication_date 2004/11/01 · arxiv created 2005/03/24 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Quasi-birth-and-death (QBD) processes with infinite “phase spaces” can exhibit unusual and interesting behavior. One of the simplest examples of such a process is the two-node tandem Jackson network, with the “phase” giving the state of the first queue and the “level” giving the state of the second queue. In this paper, we undertake an extensive analysis of the properties of this QBD. In particular, we investigate the spectral properties of Neuts’s R-matrix and show that the decay rate of the stationary distribution of the “level” process is not always equal to the convergence norm of R. In fact, we show that we can obtain any decay rate from a certain range by controlling only the transition structure at level zero, which is independent of R. We also consider the sequence of tandem queues that is constructed by restricting the waiting room of the first queue to some finite capacity, and then allowing this capacity to increase to infinity. We show that the decay rates for the finite truncations converge to a value, which is not necessarily the decay rate in the infinite waiting room case. Finally, we show that the probability that the process hits level n before level 0 given that it starts in level 1 decays at a rate which is not necessarily the same as the decay rate for the stationary distribution.