HEAVY AND LIGHT TRAFFIC IN FLUID MODELS
WITH BURST ARRIVALS

KARL SIGMAN1 AND GENJI YAMAZAKI2

1 Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University,
Mudd Building, New York, NY 10027, U.S.A.

2 Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Technology, 6-6 Asahigaoka, Hino, Tokyo 191, Japan

(Received April 11, 1991; revised March 2, 1992)

Abstract.    We consider the problem of finding a heavy and light traffic limits for the steady-state workload in a fluid model having a continuous burst arrival process. Such a model is useful for describing (among other things) the packetwise transmission of data in telecommunications, where each packet is approximated to be a continuous flow. Whereas in a queueing model, each arrival epoch, tn, corresponds to a customer with a service time Sn, the burst model is different: each arrival epoch, tn, corresponds to a burst of work, that is, a continuous flow of work (fluid, information) to the system at rate 1 during the time interval [tn, tn + Sn]. In the present paper we show that the burst and queueing models share the same heavy-traffic limit for work, but that their behavior in light traffic is quite different.

Key words and phrases:    Fluid model, queue, burst arrivals, heavy traffic, light traffic.

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