A new technique for analyzing large traffic systems

This paper presents a new technique for analyzing the frequency of a very large class of rare events in large traffic systems. The method is based on the theory of large deviations. If n is a large parameter, typically the number of potential traffic sources, then where I is the solution to an associated variational problem. We present a new analysis of a previously solved system as well as an analysis of a previously intractable system. As by-products of our analysis, we obtain estimates of the transient behavior of the system, and show how they may be used in analyzing some flow control schemes.