State-dependent importance sampling for a Jackson tandem network

This paper considers importance sampling as a tool for rare-event simulation. The focus is on estimating the probability of overflow in the downstream queue of a Jacksonian two-node tandem queue – it is known that in this setting ‘traditional’ state-independent importance-sampling distributions perform poorly. We therefore concentrate on developing a state-dependent change of measure, that we prove to be asymptotically efficient. More specific contributions are the following. (i) We concentrate on the probability of the second queue exceeding a certain predefined threshold before the system empties. Importantly, we identify an asymptotically efficient importance-sampling distribution for any initial state of the system. (ii) The choice of the importance-sampling distribution is backed up by appealing heuristics that are rooted in large-deviations theory. (iii) Our method for proving asymptotic efficiency is substantially more straightforward than some that have been used earlier. The paper is concluded by simulation experiments that show a considerable speed up.