Analysis of a two-stage network server

This paper presents modeling and analysis of a finite-queuing system of a server with two stages of service. In real life, such systems may represent typical network servers or client machines where network packets arrive and get queued to be served sequentially in two stages in a mutually exclusion fashion. That is, packets will be served by a first stage followed by a second stage, with only one stage being active at a time. In this paper, we present two equivalent analytical models to study and analyze the behavior of such systems. We derive equations for key features and performance measures of engineering and design significance. These features and measures include throughput, packet loss, packet delay, and server CPU utilization.