Copyright © 2007 Ilze Ziedins. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Consider a network of parallel finite tandem queues with two stages, where each arrival attempts to minimize its own cost due to loss. It is known that the user optimal and asymptotic system optimal policies may differ—we give examples showing that they may differ for finite systems and that as the service rate is increased at the second stage the user optimal policy may change in such a way that the total expected cost due to loss increases.