We study a queueing network with a single shared server that serves the
queues in a cyclic order. External customers arrive at the queues according to
independent Poisson processes. After completing service, a customer either
leaves the system or is routed to another queue. This model is very generic and
finds many applications in computer systems, communication networks,
manufacturing systems, and robotics. Special cases of the introduced network
include well-known polling models, tandem queues, systems with a waiting room,
multi-stage models with parallel queues, and many others. A complicating factor
of this model is that the internally rerouted customers do not arrive at the
various queues according to a Poisson process, causing standard techniques to
find waiting-time distributions to fail. In this paper we develop a new method
to obtain exact expressions for the Laplace-Stieltjes transforms of the
steady-state waiting-time distributions. This method can be applied to a wide
variety of models which lacked an analysis of the waiting-time distribution
until now