ABSTRACT
Queuing theory is commonly used to support planning, designing, and reconfiguring a network. Queuing theory may also be used where “customers” are inanimate objects, such as production processes, though sometimes the mathematics becomes quite complex in these situations. In the context of information systems, queuing theory is commonly used to help plan, design, and reconfigure communication networks. In the context of information systems, queuing theory is commonly used to help plan, design, and reconfigure communication networks, with each message representing a customer and each server, router, or other device that holds and forwards or otherwise manipulates messages representing a server. One of the more common information system applications of queuing theory is bottleneck analysis, the study of choke points or bottlenecks in a network. Queuing theory can help predict such bottlenecks by allowing the network analyst to mathematically identify the network nodes most sensitive to message volume.
