1,355 research outputs found
Modeling a healthcare system as a queueing network:The case of a Belgian hospital.
The performance of health care systems in terms of patient flow times and utilization of critical resources can be assessed through queueing and simulation models. We model the orthopaedic department of the Middelheim hospital (Antwerpen, Belgium) focusing on the impact of outages (preemptive and nonpreemptive outages) on the effective utilization of resources and on the flowtime of patients. Several queueing network solution procedures are developed such as the decomposition and Brownian motion approaches. Simulation is used as a validation tool. We present new approaches to model outages. The model offers a valuable tool to study the trade-off between the capacity structure, sources of variability and patient flow times.Belgium; Brownian motion; Capacity management; Decomposition; Health care; Healthcare; Impact; Model; Models; Performance; Performance measurement; Queueing; Queueing theory; Simulation; Stochastic processes; Structure; Studies; Systems; Time; Tool; Validation; Variability;
Traffic-Driven Spectrum Allocation in Heterogeneous Networks
Next generation cellular networks will be heterogeneous with dense deployment
of small cells in order to deliver high data rate per unit area. Traffic
variations are more pronounced in a small cell, which in turn lead to more
dynamic interference to other cells. It is crucial to adapt radio resource
management to traffic conditions in such a heterogeneous network (HetNet). This
paper studies the optimization of spectrum allocation in HetNets on a
relatively slow timescale based on average traffic and channel conditions
(typically over seconds or minutes). Specifically, in a cluster with base
transceiver stations (BTSs), the optimal partition of the spectrum into
segments is determined, corresponding to all possible spectrum reuse patterns
in the downlink. Each BTS's traffic is modeled using a queue with Poisson
arrivals, the service rate of which is a linear function of the combined
bandwidth of all assigned spectrum segments. With the system average packet
sojourn time as the objective, a convex optimization problem is first
formulated, where it is shown that the optimal allocation divides the spectrum
into at most segments. A second, refined model is then proposed to address
queue interactions due to interference, where the corresponding optimal
allocation problem admits an efficient suboptimal solution. Both allocation
schemes attain the entire throughput region of a given network. Simulation
results show the two schemes perform similarly in the heavy-traffic regime, in
which case they significantly outperform both the orthogonal allocation and the
full-frequency-reuse allocation. The refined allocation shows the best
performance under all traffic conditions.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication by JSAC-HC
On Coding for Reliable Communication over Packet Networks
We present a capacity-achieving coding scheme for unicast or multicast over
lossy packet networks. In the scheme, intermediate nodes perform additional
coding yet do not decode nor even wait for a block of packets before sending
out coded packets. Rather, whenever they have a transmission opportunity, they
send out coded packets formed from random linear combinations of previously
received packets. All coding and decoding operations have polynomial
complexity.
We show that the scheme is capacity-achieving as long as packets received on
a link arrive according to a process that has an average rate. Thus, packet
losses on a link may exhibit correlation in time or with losses on other links.
In the special case of Poisson traffic with i.i.d. losses, we give error
exponents that quantify the rate of decay of the probability of error with
coding delay. Our analysis of the scheme shows that it is not only
capacity-achieving, but that the propagation of packets carrying "innovative"
information follows the propagation of jobs through a queueing network, and
therefore fluid flow models yield good approximations. We consider networks
with both lossy point-to-point and broadcast links, allowing us to model both
wireline and wireless packet networks.Comment: 33 pages, 6 figures; revised appendi
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