Asymptotic expansions for large closed and loss queueing networks

Loss and closed queueing network models have long been of interest to telephone and computer engineers and becoming increasingly important as models of data transmission networks. This paper describes a uniform approach that has been developed during the last decade for asymptotic analysis of large capacity networks with product form of the stationary probability distribution. Such a distribution has an explicit form up to the normalization constant, or the partition function. The approach is based on representing the partition function as a contour integral in complex space and evaluating the integral using the saddle point method and theory of residues. This paper provides an introduction to the area and a review of recent work.