A rate balance principle and its application to queueing models

Abstract

We introduce a rate balance principle for general (not necessarily Markovian) stochastic processes. Special attention is given to processes with birth-and-death-like transitions, for which it is shown that for any state n, the rate of two consecutive transitions from $n-1$ to $n+1$ coincides with the corresponding rate from $n+1$ to $n-1$. We demonstrate how useful this observation is by deriving well-known, as well as new, results for non-memoryless queues with state-dependent arrival and service processes. We also use the rate balance principle to derive new results for a state-dependent queue with batch arrivals, which is a model with non-birth-and-death-like transitions.