Performance of Communication Systems

This book provides an extensive approach to support the planning and optimization process for modern communication networks. Based on an analysis of the key properties of modern network architectures, a set of requirements for such approaches is derived. A model-based performance evaluation approach is suggested, where highly-efficient matrix-geometric methods are employed in order to circumvent the drawbacks of existing numerical and simulative approaches. The book contains a thorough survey and a detailed comparison of state-of-the-art numerical algorithms in the matrix-geometric field. A high-level modeling approach based on stochastic Petri nets is developed in order to simplify the specification of complex models. To illustrate the approach, several case studies are presented, covering application areas from ATM networks to World Wide Web traffic and TCP/IP networking.