Publisher's Synopsis
Despite the proliferation and ever-increasing need for distributed processing and parallelism in computer and communication systems, their operational behaviour has been poorly understood. This is due to the extreme complexity found in cooperative processing in modern computer systems, and the complicated communication protocols for handling a variety of traffic in information network systems. In order to cope with these developments, mathematical modelling has become more and more sophisticated, and tailored to individual problems. However, it is fair to say that the performance characteristics of today's (and future) systems cannot be fully analyzed by the techniques currently available. This book is a result of the international seminar designed to promote progress in the development of techniques for resolving the performance issues of such complex systems.
