Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 290 pages, 2000.
Abstract: This work aims at providing approaches to guide the design of modern communication networks. During the last decades, the size and the complexity of communication networks increased substantially. Communication facilities have become a major infrastructural factor, and the performance offered by a network is of central interest. However, the evaluation of the performance of today's communication networks is very difficult due to their size and complexity. Although it is clearly possible to measure the performance of one particular configuration, this provides no guidance in choosing among alternative configurations prior to their actual deployment. This work aims to tackle this situation by employing a special class of stochastic processes, so called quasi-birth-and-death (QBD) processes, for modeling network nodes. In this work, we therefore adopt a high-level modeling technique which is based on the well-established stochastic Petri net formalism. Our Petri net class, called infinite-state SPNs (iSPNs), is specifically tailored towards generating QBDs; the equivalence of an iSPN-based specification to the direct specification of QBDs is formally proven, and a suitable tool environment is presented.
Keywords: QBD processes.