ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, we saw deterministic fluid queues where the flow rates were mostly constant and toward the end we saw a case where the rates varied deterministically over time. In this and the next chapter, we focus on stochastic fluid queues where flow rates are piecewise constant and vary stochastically over time. We consider only the flow rates from a countable set. On a completely different note, in some sense the diffusion limits we saw in previous chapters can be thought of as a case of flow rates from an uncountable set that are continuously varying (as opposed to being piecewise constant). Thus from a big-picture standpoint, metaphorically the models in this chapter fall somewhere between the deterministically timevarying fluid queues and diffusion queues. However, here we will not be presenting any formal scaling of any discrete queueing system to result in these fluid queues. We focus purely on performance analysis of these queues to obtain workload distributions.
