Two-choice regulation in heterogeneous closed networks

A heterogeneous closed network with one-server queues with finite capacity and one infinite-server queue is studied. A target application is bike-sharing systems. Heterogeneity is taken into account through clusters whose queues have the same parameters. Incentives to the customer to go to the least loaded one-server queue among two chosen within a cluster are investigated. By mean-field arguments, the limiting queue length stationary distribution as the number of queues gets large is analytically tractable. Moreover, when all customers follow incentives, the probability that a queue is empty or full is approximated. Sizing the system to improve performance is reachable under this policy.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

A Stochastic Model for Car-Sharing Systems

Vehicle-sharing systems are becoming important for urban transportation. In these systems, users arrive at a station, pick up a vehicle, use it for a while and then return it to another station of their choice. Depending on the type of system, there might be a possibility to book vehicles before picking-up and/or a parking space at the chosen arrival station. Each station has a finite capacity and cannot host more vehicles and reserved parking spaces than its capacity. We propose a stochastic model for an homogeneous car-sharing system with possibility to reserve a parking space at the arrival station when picking-up a car. We compute the performance of the system and the optimal fleet size according to a specific metric. It differs from a similar model for bike-sharing systems because of reservation that induces complexity, especially when traffic increases

Incentives and Redistribution in Homogeneous Bike-Sharing Systems with Stations of Finite Capacity

Bike-sharing systems are becoming important for urban transportation. In such systems, users arrive at a station, take a bike and use it for a while, then return it to another station of their choice. Each station has a finite capacity: it cannot host more bikes than its capacity. We propose a stochastic model of an homogeneous bike-sharing system and study the effect of users random choices on the number of problematic stations, i.e., stations that, at a given time, have no bikes available or no available spots for bikes to be returned to. We quantify the influence of the station capacities, and we compute the fleet size that is optimal in terms of minimizing the proportion of problematic stations. Even in a homogeneous city, the system exhibits a poor performance: the minimal proportion of problematic stations is of the order of (but not lower than) the inverse of the capacity. We show that simple incentives, such as suggesting users to return to the least loaded station among two stations, improve the situation by an exponential factor. We also compute the rate at which bikes have to be redistributed by trucks to insure a given quality of service. This rate is of the order of the inverse of the station capacity. For all cases considered, the fleet size that corresponds to the best performance is half of the total number of spots plus a few more, the value of the few more can be computed in closed-form as a function of the system parameters. It corresponds to the average number of bikes in circulation

Perturbation analysis of an M/M/1 queue in a diffusion random environment

We study in this paper an $M/M/1$ queue whose server rate depends upon the state of an independent Ornstein-Uhlenbeck diffusion process $(X(t))$ so that its value at time $t$ is $\mu \phi(X(t))$, where $\phi(x)$ is some bounded function and $\mu>0$. We first establish the differential system for the conditional probability density functions of the couple $(L(t),X(t))$ in the stationary regime, where $L(t)$ is the number of customers in the system at time $t$. By assuming that $\phi(x)$ is defined by $\phi(x) = 1-\varepsilon ((x\wedge a/\varepsilon)\vee(-b/\varepsilon))$ for some positive real numbers $a$, $b$ and $\varepsilon$, we show that the above differential system has a unique solution under some condition on $a$ and $b$. We then show that this solution is close, in some appropriate sense, to the solution to the differential system obtained when $\phi$ is replaced with $\Phi(x)=1-\varepsilon x$ for sufficiently small $\varepsilon$. We finally perform a perturbation analysis of this latter solution for small $\varepsilon$. This allows us to check at the first order the validity of the so-called reduced service rate approximation, stating that everything happens as if the server rate were constant and equal to \mu(1-\eps\E(X(t)))

A versatile and accurate approximation for LRU cache performance

In a 2002 paper, Che and co-authors proposed a simple approach for estimating the hit rates of a cache operating the least recently used (LRU) replacement policy. The approximation proves remarkably accurate and is applicable to quite general distributions of object popularity. This paper provides a mathematical explanation for the success of the approximation, notably in configurations where the intuitive arguments of Che, et al clearly do not apply. The approximation is particularly useful in evaluating the performance of current proposals for an information centric network where other approaches fail due to the very large populations of cacheable objects to be taken into account and to their complex popularity law, resulting from the mix of different content types and the filtering effect induced by the lower layers in a cache hierarchy

Stochastic networks with multiple stable points

This paper analyzes stochastic networks consisting of a set of finite capacity sites where different classes of individuals move according to some routing policy. The associated Markov jump processes are analyzed under a thermodynamic limit regime, that is, when the networks have some symmetry properties and when the number of nodes goes to infinity. An intriguing stability property is proved: under some conditions on the parameters, it is shown that, in the limit, several stable equilibrium points coexist for the empirical distribution. The key ingredient of the proof of this property is a dimension reduction achieved by the introduction of two energy functions and a convenient mapping of their local minima and saddle points. Networks with a unique equilibrium point are also presented.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009117907000000105 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Analysis of loss networks with routing

This paper analyzes stochastic networks consisting of finite capacity nodes with different classes of requests which move according to some routing policy. The Markov processes describing these networks do not, in general, have reversibility properties, so the explicit expression of their invariant distribution is not known. Kelly's limiting regime is considered: the arrival rates of calls as well as the capacities of the nodes are proportional to a factor going to infinity. It is proved that, in limit, the associated rescaled Markov process converges to a deterministic dynamical system with a unique equilibrium point characterized by a nonstandard fixed point equation.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/105051606000000466 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Impact of traffic mix on caching performance in a content-centric network

For a realistic traffic mix, we evaluate the hit rates attained in a two-layer cache hierarchy designed to reduce Internet bandwidth requirements. The model identifies four main types of content, web, file sharing, user generated content and video on demand, distinguished in terms of their traffic shares, their population and object sizes and their popularity distributions. Results demonstrate that caching VoD in access routers offers a highly favorable bandwidth memory tradeoff but that the other types of content would likely be more efficiently handled in very large capacity storage devices in the core. Evaluations are based on a simple approximation for LRU cache performance that proves highly accurate in relevant configurations