A computational approach for a fluid queue driven by a truncated birth-death process

In this paper, we consider a fluid queue driven by a truncated birth-death process with general birth and death rates. We find the equilibrium distribution of the content of the fluid buffer by computing the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of an associated real tridiagonal matrix. We provide efficient procedures which avoid numerical instability, to a greater extent, arising in a straightforward calculation of these quantities by standard procedures. In particular, we reduce the order of the matrix by one and show that this reduced matrix can be made symmetric and hence we could make use of the stable and efficient method of bisection to compute the eigenvalues. The effectiveness of these procedures is illustrated through tables and graphs.