A transient analysis of polling systems operating under exponential time-limited service disciplines

In the present article, we analyze a class of time-limited polling systems. In particular, we will derive a direct relation for the evolution of the joint queue-length during the course of a server visit. This will be done both for the pure and the exhaustive exponential time-limited discipline for general service time requirements and preemptive service. More specifically, service of individual customers is according to the preemptive-repeat-random strategy, i.e., if a service is interrupted, then at the next server visit a new service time will be drawn from the original service-time distribution. Moreover, we incorporate customer routing in our analysis, such that it may be applied to a large variety of queueing networks with a single server operating under one of the before-mentioned time-limited service disciplines. We study the time-limited disciplines by performing a transient analysis for the queue length at the served queue. The analysis of the pure time-limited discipline builds on several known results for the transient analysis of the M/G/1 queue. Besides, for the analysis of the exhaustive discipline, we will derive several new results for the transient analysis of an M/G/1 during a busy period. The final expressions (both for the exhaustive and pure case) that we obtain for the key relations generalize previous results by incorporating customer routing or by relaxing the exponentiality assumption on the service times. Finally, based on the interpretation of these key relations, we formulate a conjecture for the key relation for any branching-type service discipline operating under an exponential time-limit

Waiting times in discrete-time cyclic-service systems

Single-served, multiqueue systems with cyclic service in discrete time are considered. Nonzero switchover times between consecutive queues are assumed; the service strategies at the various queues may differ. A decomposition for the amount of work in such systems is obtained, leading to an exact expression for a weighted sum of the mean waiting times at the various queues

Waiting-time approximations in multiqueue systems with cyclic service

This study is devoted to mean waiting-time approximations in a single-server multi-queue model with cyclic service and zero switching times of the server between consecutive queues. Two different service disciplines are considered: exhaustive service and (ordinary cyclic) nonexhaustive service. For both disciplines it is shown how estimates of the mean waiting times at the various queues can be obtained when no explicit information on arrival intensities and service-time distributions is available, while only the utilizations at the queues and the lengths of the busy periods of the system can be measured. In the exhaustive case, a known mean waiting-time approximation is shown to be suitable for our purposes; in the nonexhaustive case, a new approximation has been derived which is simple and yet more accurate than existing approximations. Extensive simulation validates the approximation methods