Discrete time queues with delayed information

The authors study the behavior of a single-server discrete-time queue with batch arrivals, where the information on the queue length and possibly on service completions is delayed. Such a model describes situations arising in high speed telecommunication systems, where information arrives in messages, each comprising a variable number of fixed-length packets, and it taken one unit of time (a slot) to transmit a packet. Since it is not desirable to attempt service when the system may be empty, the authors study a model where they assume that service is attempted only if, given the information available to the server, it is certain that there are messages in the queue. The authors characterize the probability distribution of the number of messages in the queue under some general stationarity assumptions on the arrival process, when information on the queue size is delayed K slots, and derive explicit expressions of the PGF of the queue length for the case of i.i.d. batch arrivals and general independent service times. They further derive the PGF of the queue size when information on both the queue length and service completion is delayed K=1 units of time. Finally, the authors extend the results to priority queues and show that when all messages are of unit length, the cμ rule remains optimal even in the case of delayed information.