Markovian polling systems with mixed service disciplines and retrial customers (Q1969168)

The paper establishes a system of equations for the mean number of customers in each station of a polling model. The paper differs from previous work in that it assumes that customers wait at a station, not in a queue, but in a retrial pool, from where they individually reattempt for service at negative exponentially distributed intervals. The author assumes two procedures for service operation at a station. The `gating' mechanism is where customers are released from the retrial pool to form a queue when the server arrives, as opposed to the `exhaustive' mechanism where customers stay in the pool until they find a free server. In addition the model has customers arriving in batches, with customers in a batch requesting service at different stations, and a single server who moves from station to station according to a given set of probabilities.