Recurrence and transience of open Jackson networks with balanced nodes

Source abstract

Consider an open Jackson network with Poisson arrivals and exponential services, in which no node is overloaded and exactly~$k_0$ nodes have load equal to~$1$. We prove that the queue-length process is recurrent if and only if $k_0\leq 2$. For that, we show that the network satisfies a sector condition, so its capacities are comparable to those of its symmetrisation; the latter is a reversible network whose recurrence/transience can be dealt with by standard means. We also discuss what the Lyapunov-function method gives in this setting; in particular, we show that every balanced queue is empty at arbitrarily large times, also in the transient case.