Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2000
We show that several truncation properties of queueing systems are consequences of a simple property of censored stochastic processes. We first consider a discrete-time stochastic process and show that its censored process has a truncated stationary distribution. When the stochastic process has continuous time, we present a similar result under the additional condition that the process is locally balanced. We apply these results to single-server batch arrival batch service queues with finite buffers and queueing networks with finite buffers and batch movements, and extend the well-known results on truncation properties of the MX/G/1/k queues and queueing networks with jump-over blocking.