Publications with Nicholas G. Duffield

I became aware of Nick Duffield shortly after he shifted his focus from mathematical physics to communications networks and performance analysis models around 1992. Nick was able to apply his skills in large deviations theory and other asymptotic methods, honed on mean-field quantum spin systems and the like, to obtain very impressive results for queueing models.

My collaborations with Nick began in 1996 in when he joined the Mathematics of Services Department headed by Albert Greenberg, a precursor of the current IP Network Management and Performance Department headed by Albert Greenberg in the Internet and Networking Systems Research Laboratory, headed by Hamid Ahmadi. Ever since the formation of our department, Nick has played a leading role in setting up the measurement activity.

My research with Nick focused on source traffic models that can represent complex Internet traffic and asymptotic methods to analyze the performance of complex systems. See the overview of our department's work on performance analysis models.

  1. Recovery from Congestion in a Large Multi-Server System. Teletraffic Contributions for the Information Age, Proceedings of ITC 15, V. Ramaswami and P. E. Wirth (eds.), Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1997, pp. 371-380.
  2. Control and Recovery from Rare Congestion Events in a Large Multi-Server System. Queueing Systems, vol. 26, 1997, pp. 69-104. [PDF] [published PDF]
  3. A Source Traffic Model and its Transient Analysis for Network Control. Stochastic Models, vol. 14, Nos. 1 and 2, 1998, pp. 51-78. [PostScript] [PDF]
  4. Large Deviations for Inverse Processes with Nonlinear Scalings. Annals of Applied Probability, vol. 9, No. 4, 1998.
  5. Network Design and Control Using On-Off and Multi-Level Source Traffic Models with Heavy-Tailed Distributions. Chapter in Self-Similar Network Traffic and Performance Evaluation, Kihong Park and Walter Willinger, eds., Wiley, New York, 2000, pp. 421-445. [PostScript] [PDF]
  6. A Nonstationary Offered-Load Model for Packet Networks. Telecommunication Systems vol. 13, Nos. 3,4, March-April 2001, pp. 271-296 (with William A. Massey). [PostScript] [PDF] [published PDF]