Product form Solution for Queueing Networks with Poisson Arrivals and General Service Time Distributions with Finite Means

Abstract

Product form was first introduced by Jackson [Operations Research, 1957; Management Science, 1963] who considered only negative exponential service distributions with queue length dependent service rates. Posner and Bernholtz [Operations Research, 1968] showed that one has product form in the case where there are many classes of customers, service times are exponential with class queue length dependent service rates, and lag times (the time for a customer to travel between two servers is a random variable with continuously differentiable distribution function). Baskett, Chandy, Muntz and Palacios [JACM, 1975] extended these results to networks with multiple classes of customers and service time distributions which have rational Laplace transforms vanishing at ∞. Chandy, Howard and Towsley [JACM, 1977] extended this further to the case where the service time distribution functions are continuously differentiable. They also introduced the concept of station balance and established some important relationships between station balance, local balance and product form. In particular, for the closed queueing network they showed that if each queue in the network satisfies local balance in isolation with Poisson arrivals then one has product formsolution for the network. This paper extends previous results to arbitrary service with finite mean (the nondifferentiable case included). This is done by introducing supplementary variables for the remaining service requirements at the various queues in the system. By using generalized function (in the sense of Schwartz) a new technique is presented for handling queueing networks in which service distributions may be general.