Layered Queues

Call for Papers

Queueing theory is a well-established branch of applied probability and operations research, with applications in many areas, ranging from computer communications and manufacturing to healthcare. Classical queueing models involve servers working on customers that arrive randomly and require a stochastic amount of service. Recent applications have given rise to much more complex, often layered service architectures, where entities that act as server at one layer act as customer at a higher layer.

• In computer communications, one encounters such phenomena, for example, in webserver systems, multithreaded software servers, rendezvous networks, and peer-to-peer networks (where users simultaneously download music and act as servers for other users)
• In manufacturing, machines are processing jobs until they break down and require repair; they then temporarily are customers of a repair server. Furthermore, in semiconductor manufacturing a machine may require the assistance of an operator serving several machines
• In primary healthcare, examination rooms play both the role of “servers”, as they accept patients for service, and of “customers” visited by doctors and nurses rotating among several rooms
• The design and performance analysis regarding these new applications requires the development of sophisticated new stochastic models, and of powerful analytic, asymptotic, approximative, and numerical tools

We invite authors to submit original research and review articles addressing the above issues. We welcome contributions to the modeling, analysis, computational aspects, and optimization of layered queues. We hope that they will stimulate further research in layered queues and will enhance our understanding of such queues.

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jam/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/jam/lq/ according to the following timetable:

Lead Guest Editor

• Onno Boxma, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, 5612 AZ Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Guest Editors

• Maria Vlasiou, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, 5612 AZ Eindhoven, The Netherlands
• Murray Woodside, Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1S 5B6