Level-Phase Independence for Fluid Queues

ABSTRACT

A Markov-modulated fluid queue is a two-dimensional Markov process; the first dimension is continuous and is usually called the level, and the second is the state of a Markov process that determines the evolution of the level, it is usually called the phase. We show that it is always possible to modify the transition rules at the boundary level of the fluid queue in order to obtain independence between the level and the phase under the stationary distribution. We obtain this result by exploiting the similarity between fluid queues and Quasi-Birth-and-Death (QBD) processes.