On the fluid limit of the M/G/∞ queue

Abstract

The paper deals with the fluid limits of some generalized M/G/∞ queues under heavy-traffic scaling. The target application is the modeling of Internet traffic at the flow level. Our paper first gives a simplified approach in the case of Poisson arrivals. Expressing the state process as a functional of some Poisson point process, an elementary proof for limit theorems based on martingales techniques and weak convergence results is given. The paper illustrates in the special Poisson arrivals case the classical heavy-traffic limit theorems for the G/G/∞ queue developed earlier by Borovkov and by Iglehart, and later by Krichagina and Puhalskii. In addition, asymptotics for the covariance of the limit Gaussian processes are obtained for some classes of service time distributions, which are useful to derive in practice the key parameters of these distributions.