In this paper, transient characteristics related to excursions of the occupation process of M/M/∞ queues are studied, when the excursion level is large and close to the mean offered load. We show that the classical diffusion approximation by an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck (OU) process captures well the average values of the transient variables considered, while the asymptotic distributions of these variables depart from those corresponding to the OU process. They exhibit, however, equivalent tail behaviour at infinity and numerical evidence shows that they are amazingly close to each other over the whole half-line.

A second-order heavy traffic approximation for the stationary waiting-time d.f. G for GI/G/1 queues is derived, the first-order term of which is Kingman's (1961), (1962a), (1965) exponential approximation. On the way to this result there are others of independent interest, such as a convolution equation relating this waiting time d.f. G with the d.f. of a related ladder height, an integral equation for G and some stochastic bounds for G. The main result requires a particular type of functional convergence that may also be of interest.

In this paper we prove that the limiting distribution of the general bulk queue exists and is independent of the initial conditions if and only if the traffic intensity is less than one. We further generalize the following heavy traffic results of the GI/G/1 model to the general bulk queue model. When ρ > 1 or ρ = 1 the waiting time is distributed approximately as a Gaussian variable and the absolute value of a Gaussian variable, respectively. The exponential approximation is derived from the Wiener–Hopf matrix equations established in a previous paper while the unstable case ρ ≧ 1 is treated by means of functional central limit theorems for mixing processes.

Let X(t) be the virtual waiting-time process of a stable M/G/1 queue. Let R(t) be the covariance function of the stationary process X(t), B(t) the busy-period distribution of X(t); and let E(t) = P{X(t) = 0|X(0) = 0}.

For X(t) some heavy-traffic results are given, among which are limiting expressions for R(t) and its derivatives and for B(t) and E(t).

These results are used to find the covariance function of stationary Brownian motion on [0, ∞).