Cardinal rational approximants for performance analysis of stochastic discrete event systems

Performance index functions with integer pa rameters are important in the analysis of computer systems, communication networks and general distributed and parallel processing systems. Most of these performance functions have nice properties such as monotonicity, convexity, analyticity, etc. These properties make it possible to use ratio nal functions to extrapolate the performance fun ctions. In this paper we illustrate this approach through several examples. Our numerical results suggest that this approach could lead to a powerful tool for many applications.