M/M/1 Queue: The Single-Server Queueing Model

The M/M/1 queue is the foundational single-server queueing model in which customers arrive according to a Poisson process with rate λ, are served one at a time by a single server with exponentially distributed service times at rate μ, and wait in an infinite-capacity first-come-first-served queue. Formalized within the Kendall notation framework by David Kendall in 1953, building on A. K. Erlang's early twentieth-century telephone traffic work, it yields closed-form steady-state performance measures when the traffic intensity ρ = λ/μ is less than one.