We consider a GI/G/c/K-type retrial queueing system with constant retrial
rate. The system consists of a primary queue and an orbit queue. The primary
queue has c identical servers and can accommodate the maximal number of K
jobs. If a newly arriving job finds the full primary queue, it joins the orbit.
The original primary jobs arrive to the system according to a renewal process.
The jobs have general i.i.d. service times. A job in front of the orbit queue
retries to enter the primary queue after an exponentially distributed time
independent of the orbit queue length. Telephone exchange systems, Medium
Access Protocols and short TCP transfers are just some applications of the
proposed queueing system. For this system we establish minimal sufficient
stability conditions. Our model is very general. In addition, to the known
particular cases (e.g., M/G/1/1 or M/M/c/c systems), the proposed model covers
as particular cases the deterministic service model and the Erlang model with
constant retrial rate. The latter particular cases have not been considered in
the past. The obtained stability conditions have clear probabilistic
interpretation