EIE4104 Mobile Networking (2018/19)

Tutorial 1
Unit 2: Queueing Theory

Review Questions

1. What is a random process?

2. What is a Markov chain?
3. What is a birth-death process?
4. What is the Poisson distribution?
5. What are the applications of queueing theory?
6. What are the notations for a queueing system?
7. What is a state in a queueing system?
8. What are the state transition diagrams for different queueing systems?
9. What is the average system occupancy in different queueing systems?
10. What is the average waiting time in different queueing systems?
11. What is Little Theorem?

Problems

1. The number of calls arrive under a particular time in a cell has been established to be a Poisson
distribution. The average number of calls arriving in a cell in 1 millisecond is 5. What is the
probability that 8 calls arrive in a cell in a given millisecond?

2. A snapshot of the traffic pattern in a cell with 10 users of a wireless system is given as
follows:

a) Assuming the call setup/connection and call disconnection time to be zero, what is the
average duration of a call?
b) What is the minimum number of channels required to support this sequence of calls?
c) Show the allocation of channels to different users for part (b) of the Problem.
d) Given the number of channels obtained in part (b), for what fraction of time are the
channels utilized?

3. Given that the number of arrivals of data packet in the receiver follows a Poisson distribution
on which arrival rate is 10 arrivals per second. What is the probability that the number of
arrivals is more than 8 but less than 11 during a time of interval of 2 seconds?

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4. What should be a relationship between call arrival rate and service rate when a cellular system
is in a steady state? Explain clearly.

5. Customers arrive at a fast-food restaurant at a rate of five per minute, and wait to receive their
order for an average of five minutes. Customers eat in the restaurant with probability 0.5, and take
away their order without eating with probability 0.5. A meal requires an average of 20 minutes.
What is the average number of customers in the restaurant?

6. Consider a disk drive that can complete an average request in 10 ms. The time to complete a
request is exponentially distributed. Over a period of 30 minutes, 117,000 requests were made
to the disk. How long did it take to complete the average request? What is the average number
of queued requests?

7. Persons arrive at a Taxi stand with room for five taxi according to a Poisson process with rate
one per minute. A person boards a taxi upon arrival if one is available and otherwise waits in
a line. Taxi arrive at the stand according to a Poisson process with rate two per minute. An
arriving taxi that finds the stand full departs immediately; otherwise, it picks up a customer if
at least one is waiting, or else joins the queue of waiting taxis. What is the probability of no
taxi waiting in the stand?

8. A telephone company establishes a direct connection between two cities expecting Poisson traffic
with rate 30 calls/min. The durations of calls are independent and exponentially distributed with
mean 3 minutes. Inter-arrival times are independent of call durations. How many circuits should
the company provide to ensure an attempt call is blocked (because all circuits are busy) with
probability less than 0.01? It is assumed that blocked calls are lost, i.e., a blocked call is not
attempted again.

9. In a transition diagram of M/M/5 model, write the state transition equations and find a relation
for the system to be in each state.

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