Performance analysis for overflow loss systems of processor-sharing queues

Overflow loss systems have wide applications in telecommunications and multimedia systems. In this paper, we consider an overflow loss system consisting of a set of finite-buffer processor-sharing (PS) queues, and develop effective methods for evaluation of its blocking probability. For such a problem, an existing approximation of the blocking probability is based on decomposition of the system into independent PS queues. We provide a new approximation which instead performs decomposition on a surrogate model of the original system, and demonstrate via extensive numerical results that our new approximation is more accurate and robust than the existing approach. We also examine the sensitivity of the blocking probability to the service time distribution, and demonstrate that an exponential distribution is a good approximation for a wide range of service time distributions.