Heavy-traffic analysis of the sojourn time in a three node Jackson network with overtaking

We consider a Jackson network consisting of three first-in-first-out (FIFO)M/M/1 queues. When customers leave the first queue they can be routed to either the second or third queue. Thus, a customer that traverses the network by going from the first to the second to the third queue, can be overtaken by another customer that is routed from the first queue directly to the third. We study the distribution of the sojourn time of a customer through the three node network, in the heavy traffic limit. A three term heavy traffic asymptotic approximation to the sojourn time density is derived. The leading term shows that the nodes decouple in the heavy traffic limit. The next two terms, however, do show the dependence of the sojourn times at the individual nodes and give quantitative measures of the effects of overtaking.