Stochastic bounds for heterogeneous-server queues with Erlang service times

Abstract

This paper establishes stochastic bounds for the phasal departure times of a heterogeneous-server queue with a recurrent input and Erlang service times. The multi-server queue is bounded by a simple GI/E/1 queue. When the shape parameters of the Erlang service-time distributions of different servers are the same, these relations yield two-sided bounds for customer waiting times and the queue length, which can in turn be used with known results for single-server queues to obtain characterizations of steady-state distributions and heavy-traffic approximations.