Two queues in series with a finite, intermediate waitingroom

Abstract

A service unit I, with Poisson input and general service times is in series with a unit II, with negative-exponential service times. The intermediate waitingroom can accomodate at most k persons and a customer cannot leave unit I when the waitingroom is full. The paper shows that this system of queues can be studied in terms of an imbedded semi-Markov process. Equations for the time dependent distributions are given, but the main emphasis of the paper is on the equilibrium conditions and on asymptotic results.