An interesting property of an M/M/ 1 queue, which greatly simplifies combining these queues into a network, is the surprising fact that the output of an M/M/ queue with arrival rate is a Poisson process of rate This is part of Burke's theorem, which follows from reversibility A Markov chain has the property that P[future present, past] P[future present] Conditional on the present state, future states and past states are independent