| In the 1970s, Baskett, Chandy, Muntz and Palacios, Kelly, and
others, generalized the earlier results of Jackson and obtained
explicit solutions for the steady--state distributions of some
restricted queueing networks. These queueing networks are called
"product--form networks," due to the structure of their explicit
solutions. The class of such tractable networks is quite small,
however. For example, if customers require different mean service
times on different revisits to the same server, or if customers on
a later visit are given higher priority, then very little is known
concerning whether the network is even stable, or what form the
steady--state distribution has if it exists. Recently, some new
methods have been developed for establishing the stability of a
system, and for...
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