The authors consider the maximum waiting time among the first n customers in the GI/G/1 queue. They use strong approximations to prove, under regularity conditions, convergence of the normalized maximum wait to the Gumbel extreme-value distribution when the traffic intensity ρ approaches 1 from below and n approaches infinity at a suitable rate. The normalization depends on the interarrival-time and service-time distributions only through their first two moments, corresponding to the iterated limit in which first ρ approaches 1 and then n approaches infinity. The authors need n to approach infinity sufficiently fast so that n(1-ρ)2⇒•. They also need n to approach infinity sufficiently slowly: If the service time has a pth moment for ρ>2, then it suffices for (1-ρ)n1’/p to remain bounded; if the service time has a finite moment generating function, then it suffices to have (1-ρ)logn⇒0. This limit can hold even when the normalized maximum waiting time fails to converge to the Gumbel distribution as n⇒• for each fixed ρ. Similar limits hold for the queue-length process.
