Steady-state analysis of a queue with varying service rate

In this paper we study a queueing model with a server that changes its service rate according to a finite birth and death process. The object of interest is the simultaneous distribution of the number of customers in the system and the state of the server in steady-state. The model can be applied to the performance analysis of (low priority) Available Bit Rate (ABR) traffic at an ATM switch in the presence of traffic with a higher priority such as Variable Bit Rate (VBR) traffic and Constant Bit Rate (CBR) traffic. For a specific example we illustrate by numerical experiments the influence of the latter traffic types on the ABR service.