State-dependent importance sampling for a Jackson tandem network

Abstract

This article considers importance sampling as a tool for rare-event simulation. The focus is on estimating the probability of overflow in the downstream queue of a Jacksonian two-node tandem queue; it is known that in this setting “traditional” state-independent importance-sampling distributions perform poorly. We therefore concentrate on developing a state-dependent change of measure, that we prove to be asymptotically efficient. More specific contributions are the following. (i) We concentrate on the probability of the second queue exceeding a certain predefined threshold before the system empties. Importantly, we identify an asymptotically efficient importance-sampling distribution for any initial state of the system. (ii) The choice of the importance-sampling distribution is backed up by appealing heuristics that are rooted in large-deviations theory. (iii) The method for proving asymptotic efficiency relies on probabilistic arguments only. The article is concluded by simulation experiments that show a considerable speedup.