Stability analysis of a two‐station cascade queueing network

We consider a two‐station cascade network, where the first station has Poisson input and the second station has renewal input, with i.i.d. service times at both stations. The following partial interaction exists between stations: whenever the second station becomes empty while customers are awaiting service at the first one, one customer can jump to the second station to be served there immediately. However, the first station cannot assist the second one in the opposite case. For this system, we establish necessary and sufficient stability conditions of the basic workload process, using a regenerative method. An extension of the basic model, including a multiserver first station, a different service time distribution for customers jumping from station 1 to station 2, and an arbitrary threshold d 1≥1 on the queue‐size at station 1 allowing jumps to station 2, are also treated.