Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2016
A number of stochastic queueing systems exhibit an interesting phenomenon known as the cut-off phenomenon. A properly scaled version of the distance between the transient process and the stationary one converges to a step function as the initial load converges to infinity. The purpose of this paper is to promote the idea that this phenomenon is a direct consequence of the coupling between the two processes, being thus generalizable to systems lacking any kind of Markovian structure.
The work of P. Konstantopoulos was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant ASC 88–8802764.