The BCD queue and its ramifications (Q1206497)

This paper contains generalizations and unifications of certain classes of queueing systems with the aim to obtain tractable steady state solutions which resemble the product-form results and quasi-reversibility of Kelly's symmetric queues. The versatility of the new model depends on using an environmental process which substitutes the birth-death process as the starting point for defining symmetric queues. This environment process resembles the usual LCFS-preemptive resume queueing system with different customer types --- resulting at the same time in modelling a reasonably general environment and a birth-death type steady state. Having at hand this explicit environment distribution arrival and service mechanism for customers of different classes are incorporated still yielding explicit steady state distributions. It is shown that the environment process as well as the derived queueing process show insensitivity under change of ``service time'' distributions as long as their means are fixed. Several examples are given.