ABSTRACT
In this chapter we study an important special class of continuous-time stochastic
processes called Poisson Processes. These processes are defined in terms of random
variables with exponential distributions, called “exponential random variables” for
short.We shall see in this and the next few chapters that exponential random variables
are used to build a large number of stochastic models. It is critical for the student to
develop an ability to deal with the exponential distributions freely, without having to
think too much. With this in mind we have collected several relevant properties of
the exponential distributions in this section. We begin with the definition.
