Before determining the main characteristics of the system we need one more theorem. In order to formulate it, we introduce some further notations. Let Q(i)(P(i)) denote the steady state probability that request i is in the source (at the service facility) for i = 1, . . . ,N. It is clear that the process (Y (t), t ≥ 0) is a Markovregenerative process with state space