Performance analysis of a discrete-time queueing system with customer deadlines

This paper studies a discrete-time queueing system where each customer has a maximum allowed sojourn time in the system, referred to as the “deadline” of the customer. Deadlines of consecutive customers are modelled as independent and geometrically distributed random variables. The arrival process of new customers, furthermore, is assumed to be general and independent, while service times of the customers are deterministically equal to one slot each. For this queueing model, we are able to obtain exact formulas for quantities as the mean system content, the mean customer delay, and the deadline-expiration ratio. These formulas, however, contain infinite sums and infinite products, which implies that truncations are required to actually compute numerical values. Therefore, we also derive some easy-to-evaluate approximate results for the main performance measures. These approximate results are quite accurate, as we show in some numerical examples. Possible applications of this type of queueing model are numerous: the (variable) deadlines could model, for instance, the fact that customers may become impatient and leave the queue unserved if they have to wait too long in line, but they could also reflect the fact that the service of a customer is not useful anymore if it cannot be delivered soon enough, etc.