Let X be a countable discrete abelian group with automorphism group Aut(X). Let ξ1 and ξ2 be independent X-valued random variables with distributions μ1 and μ2, respectively. Suppose that α1,α2,β1,β2∈Aut(X) and β1α−11±β2α−12∈Aut(X). Assuming that the conditional distribution of the linear form L2 given L1 is symmetric, where L2=β1ξ1+β2ξ2 and L1=α1ξ1+α2ξ2, we describe all possibilities for the μj. This is a group-theoretic analogue of Heyde’s characterization of Gaussian distributions on the real line.

Consider the total service time of a job on an unreliable server under preemptive-repeat-different and preemptive-resume service disciplines. With identical initial conditions, for both cases, we notice that the distributions of the total service time under these two disciplines coincide, when the original service time (without interruptions due to server failures) is exponential and independent of the server reliability. We show that this fact under varying server reliability is a characterization of the exponential distribution. Further we show, under the same initial conditions, that the coincidence of the mean values also leads to the same characterization.

The characterization of the exponential distribution as given by Dimitrov and Khalil (1990) is improved by substantially weakening the conditions.

In this paper we derive a new property of the exponential distribution, closely related to a single-server queueing system with unreliable server. We show that this new property is another characterization of the exponential law.

The negative exponential distribution is characterized in terms of two independent random variables. Only one of the random variables has a negative exponential distribution whilst the other can belong to a wide class of distributions. This result is then applied to two models for the reliability of a system of two modules subject to revealed and unrevealed faults to show when the models are equivalent. It is also shown, under certain conditions, that the system availability is only independent of the distribution of revealed failure times in one module when unrevealed failure times in the other module have a negative exponential distribution.