Analysis of Communication Networks

This volume consists of the proceedings of the Workshop on Analysis and Simulation of Communication Networks held at The Fields Institute (Toronto). The workshop was divided into two main themes, entitled 'Stability and Load Balancing of a Network of Call Centers' and 'Traffic and Performance'. The call center industry is large and fast-growing. In order to provide top-notch customer service, it needs good mathematical models. The first part of the volume focuses on probabilistic issues involved in optimizing the performance of a call center. While this was the motivating application, many of the papers are also applicable to more general distributed queuing networks.The second part of the volume discusses the characterization of traffic streams and how to estimate their impact on the performance of a queuing system. The performance of queues under worst-case traffic flows or flows with long bursts is treated. These studies are motivated by questions about buffer dimensioning and call admission control in ATM or IP networks. This volume will serve researchers as a comprehensive, state-of-the-art reference source on developments in this rapidly expanding field.Predicting response times in processor-sharing queues by A. R. Ward and W. Whitt Bilingual server call centres by D. A. Stanford and W. K. Grassmann On dynamic scheduling of a parallel server system with complete resource pooling by R. J. Williams Dynamic scheduling for queuing networks derived from discrete-review policies by Y. C. Teh. Large derviations for join the shorter queue by S. R. E. Turner. Comparing load balancing algorithms for distributed queuing networks by D. R. McDonald and S. R. E. Turner Estimating tail probabilities in queues via extremal statistics by P. W. Glynn and A. J. Zeevi Extremal traffic and worst-case performance for queues with shaped arrivals by G. Kesidis and T. Konstantopoulos. Long range dependence of inputs and outputs of some classical queues by D. J. Daley and R. A. Vesilo. On 'catastrophic' behavior of queuing networks by S. Grishechkin, M. Devetsikiotis, I. Lambadaris, and C. Hobbs.