Abstract

Loss and closed queueing network models have long been of interest to telephone and computer engineers and becoming increasingly important as models of data transmission networks. This paper describes a uniform approach that has been developed during the last decade for asymptotic analysis of large capacity networks with product form of the stationary probability distribution. Such a distribution has an explicit form up to the normalization constant, or the partition function. The approach is based on representing the partition function as a contour integral in complex space and evaluating the integral using the saddle point method and theory of residues. This paper provides an introduction to the area and a review of recent work.