Power and deterministic rules of thumb for probabilistic problems in computer communications

By applying tools from queueing theory to problems in computer communications and other multiaccess systems, it is shown that the smoothing effect of the law of large numbers permits deterministic reasoning in the case of many shared resources. Pure delay, pure loss, and combined loss and delay systems are considered. The general result found is that one should operate a system at that load which just saturates the system resources; by defining power in terms of efficiency, blocking and response time, it is shown that, in the limit, power is maximized at this saturated load.