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An efficient approximation to wait time in M/M/c queues with application to staffing planning

Published:18 March 2005Publication History

ABSTRACT

Planning departments for services such as support centers need to estimate the minimal level of resources needed to meet QoS requirements. We present a fast and numerically robust approximation to a typical QoS requirement, the wait time probability for an M/M/c queue. We then show its superiority to straightforward implementations, which have higher order of computational complexity and suffer from underflows and overflows. A possible extension of this model, once staffing levels have been determined, is to use a similar algorithm to size a VOIP network. We envision a method with similar numerical efficiency to the one reported here, except the queueing model needs to be GI/G/1 to evaluate the data network with VOIP in a DiffSrv Expedited Forwarding class.

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            • Published in

              cover image ACM Conferences
              ACM-SE 43: Proceedings of the 43rd annual Southeast regional conference - Volume 2
              March 2005
              430 pages
              ISBN:1595930590
              DOI:10.1145/1167253

              Copyright © 2005 ACM

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              Association for Computing Machinery

              New York, NY, United States

              Publication History

              • Published: 18 March 2005

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