Monte Carlo summation applied to multichain queueing networks

Although many closed multichain queuing networks give rise to a product-form solution for their equilibrium probabilities, evaluating performance measures remains nontrivial due to the presence of a normalization constant. The authors propose the application of Monte Carlo summation in order to determine the normalization constant, throughputs, and gradients of throughputs. The rough idea is to randomly sample the product-form solution over the state space and then average to obtain a consistent estimate. The Monte Carlo summation method has computational requirements that grow polynomially in the problem size, in some cases linearly, and can be adapted to arbitrary product-form networks.