Affiliation: | AT&T Laboratories, 180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971, USA |
Abstract: | Consider a buffer whose input is a superposition of L independent identical sources, and which is served at rate sL. Recent work has shown that, under very general circumstances, the stationary tail probabilities for the queue of unfinished work Q in the buffer have the asymptotics PQ > Lb] ≈ e?LI(b) for large L. Here the shape function, I, is obtained from a variational expression involving the transient log cumulant generating function of the arrival process. In this paper, we extend this analysis to cover time-dependent asymptotics for Markov arrival processes subject to conditioning at some instant. In applications we envisage that such conditioning would arise due to knowledge of the queue at a coarse-grained level, for example of the number of current active sources. We show how such partial knowledge can be used to predict future tail probabilities by use of a time dependent, conditioned shape function. We develop some heuristics to describe the time-dependent shape function in terms of a reduced set of quantities associated with the underlying arrivals process and show how to calculate them for renewal arrivals and a class of ON-OFF arrivals. This bypasses the full variational calculation of the shape function for such models. |