A fluid system with coupled input and output, and its application to bottlenecks in ad hoc networks.

This paper studies a fluid queue with coupled input and output. Flows arrive according to a Poisson process, and when n flows are present, each of them transmits traffic into the queue at a rate c/(n + 1), where the remaining c/(n + 1) is used to serve the queue. We assume exponentially distributed flow sizes, so that the queue under consideration can be regarded as a system with Markov fluid input. The rationale behind studying this queue lies in ad hoc networks: bottleneck links have roughly this type of sharing policy. We consider four performance metrics: (i) the stationary workload of the queue, (ii) the queueing delay, i.e., the delay of a