Modes of growth of counting processes with increasing arrival rates

Abstract

Jumping processes which grow by unit jumps, with decreasing sojourn times between successive jumps, are studied. Markovian birth processes, non-Markovian branching processes, and some generalizations of these are special cases. Three classes are described, in one of which growth is explosive, in the second asymptotically continuous, and in the third oscillatory. A theorem is proved which gives an explicit functional expression in the asymptotically continuous case, and borderline cases between the classes are investigated.