Perturbation Analysis of a Variable M/M/1 Queue: A Probabilistic Approach

Motivated by the problem of the coexistence on transmission links of telecommunication networks of elastic and unresponsive traffic, we study in this paper the impact on the busy period of an M/M/1 queue of a small perturbation in the server rate. The perturbation depends upon an independent stationary process (X(t)) and is quantified by means of a parameter \eps \ll 1. We specifically compute the two first terms of the power series expansion in \eps of the mean value of the busy period duration. This allows us to study the validity of the Reduced Service Rate (RSR) approximation, which consists in comparing the perturbed M/M/1 queue with the M/M/1 queue where the service rate is constant and equal to the mean value of the perturbation. For the first term of the expansion, the two systems are equivalent. For the second term, the situation is more complex and it is shown that the correlations of the environment process (X(t)) play a key role

Quasi-stationary analysis for queues with temporary overload

Motivated by the high variation in transmission rates for document transfer in the Internet and file down loads from web servers, we study the buffer content in a queue with a fluctuating service rate. The fluctuations are assumed to be driven by an independent stochastic process. We allow the queue to be overloaded in some of the server states. In all but a few special cases, either exact analysis is not tractable, or the dependence of system performance in terms of input parameters (such as the traffic load) is hidden in complex or implicit characterizations. Various asymptotic regimes have been considered to develop insightful approximations. In particular, the so-called quasistationary approximation has proven extremely useful under the assumption of uniform stability. We refine the quasi-stationary analysis to allow for temporary instability, by studying the “effective system load” which captures the effect of accumulated work during periods in which the queue is unstable

Cross-layer Congestion Control, Routing and Scheduling Design in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

This paper considers jointly optimal design of crosslayer congestion control, routing and scheduling for ad hoc wireless networks. We first formulate the rate constraint and scheduling constraint using multicommodity flow variables, and formulate resource allocation in networks with fixed wireless channels (or single-rate wireless devices that can mask channel variations) as a utility maximization problem with these constraints. By dual decomposition, the resource allocation problem naturally decomposes into three subproblems: congestion control, routing and scheduling that interact through congestion price. The global convergence property of this algorithm is proved. We next extend the dual algorithm to handle networks with timevarying channels and adaptive multi-rate devices. The stability of the resulting system is established, and its performance is characterized with respect to an ideal reference system which has the best feasible rate region at link layer. We then generalize the aforementioned results to a general model of queueing network served by a set of interdependent parallel servers with time-varying service capabilities, which models many design problems in communication networks. We show that for a general convex optimization problem where a subset of variables lie in a polytope and the rest in a convex set, the dual-based algorithm remains stable and optimal when the constraint set is modulated by an irreducible finite-state Markov chain. This paper thus presents a step toward a systematic way to carry out cross-layer design in the framework of “layering as optimization decomposition” for time-varying channel models

Two queues with random time-limited polling

In this paper, we analyse a single server polling model with two queues. Customers arrive at the two queues according to two independent Poisson processes. There is a single server that serves both queues with generally distributed service times. The server spends an exponentially distributed amount of time in each queue. After the completion of this residing time, the server instantaneously switches to the other queue, i.e., there is no switch-over time. For this polling model we derive the steady-state marginal workload distribution, as well as heavy traffic and heavy tail asymptotic results. Furthermore, we also calculate the joint queue length distribution for the special case of exponentially distributed service times using singular perturbation analysis

Synchronization in Weighted Uncorrelated Complex Networks in a Noisy Environment: Optimization and Connections with Transport Efficiency

Motivated by synchronization problems in noisy environments, we study the Edwards-Wilkinson process on weighted uncorrelated scale-free networks. We consider a specific form of the weights, where the strength (and the associated cost) of a link is proportional to $(k_{i}k_{j})^{\beta}$ with $k_{i}$ and $k_{j}$ being the degrees of the nodes connected by the link. Subject to the constraint that the total network cost is fixed, we find that in the mean-field approximation on uncorrelated scale-free graphs, synchronization is optimal at $\beta^{*}$$=$-1. Numerical results, based on exact numerical diagonalization of the corresponding network Laplacian, confirm the mean-field results, with small corrections to the optimal value of $\beta^{*}$. Employing our recent connections between the Edwards-Wilkinson process and resistor networks, and some well-known connections between random walks and resistor networks, we also pursue a naturally related problem of optimizing performance in queue-limited communication networks utilizing local weighted routing schemes.Comment: Papers on related research can be found at http://www.rpi.edu/~korniss/Research