Refined large deviations asymptotics for Markov-modulated infinite-server systems

TL;DR

This paper develops precise asymptotic formulas for tail probabilities in large deviations of Markov-modulated infinite-server systems, improving upon previous logarithmic estimates by deriving exact asymptotics through probabilistic analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel technique to obtain exact large-deviation asymptotics for the number of customers, surpassing prior logarithmic approximations, in Markov-modulated infinite-server models.

Findings

Exact asymptotics for tail probabilities are derived.

Numerical experiments confirm the accuracy of the asymptotic formulas.

Abstract

Many networking-related settings can be modeled by Markov-modulated infinite-server systems. In such models, the customers' arrival rates and service rates are modulated by a Markovian background process, additionally, there are infinitely many servers (and consequently the resulting model is often used as a proxy for the corresponding many-server model). The Markov-modulated infinite-server model hardly allows any explicit analysis, apart from results in terms of systems of (ordinary or partial) differential equations for the underlying probability generating functions, and recursions to obtain all moments. As a consequence, recent research efforts have pursued an asymptotic analysis in various limiting regimes, notably the central-limit regime (describing fluctuations around the average behavior) and the large-deviations regime (focusing on rare events). Many of these results use the property that the number of customers in the system obeys a Poisson distribution with a random parameter. The objective of this paper is to develop techniques to accurately approximate tail probabilities in the large-deviations regime. We consider the scaling in which the arrival rates are inflated by a factor $N$, and we are interested in the probability that the number of customers exceeds a given level $Na$. Where earlier contributions focused on so-called $logarithmic$ $asymptotics$ of this exceedance probability (which are inherently imprecise), the present paper improves upon those results in that $exact$ $asymptotics$ are established. These are found in two steps: first the distribution of the random parameter of the Poisson distribution is characterized, and then this knowledge is used to identify the exact asymptotics. The paper is concluded by a set of numerical experiments, in which the accuracy of the asymptotic results is assessed.