Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2009
We introduce the concept of “strong interchangeability” of random vectors. Strongly interchangeable random vectors arise naturally in packetized voice channels, M/G/1 queues, symmetric queueing networks, and other standard symmetric distributions. We study some properties of strongly interchangeable random vectors. We show that if (X1, …, XN) is a strongly interchangeable random vector, then even though there is no Markov property, taboo probabilities can be used to compute the joint distribution of ŽN = min1≤n≤N σnk=IXk and ZN = max1≤n≤N σnk=1Xk. For a special instance of this problem that arises in packetized voice communication, it is shown that the resulting algorithm essentially has a complexity of order N4. When ( σnk=1Xk, n = 1,… N) is an associated random vector bound for the joint distribution of ŽN and ZN are obtained and applied to the packetized voice communication problem.