Cardinal rational approximants for performance analysis of stochastic discrete event systems

Performance index functions with integer parameters are important in the analysis of computer systems, communication networks and general distributed and parallel processing systems. Most of these performance functions have nice properties such as monotonicity, convexity, analyticity, etc. These properties make it possible to use rational functions to extrapolate the performance functions. In this paper we illustrate this approach through several examples. Our numerical results suggest that this approach could lead to a powerful tool for many applications