IMPROVING THE PERFORMANCE OF POLLING MODELS USING FORCED IDLE TIMES

Abstract

We consider polling models in the sense of Takagi [19]. In our case, the feature of the server is that it may be forced to wait idly for new messages at an empty queue instead of switching to the next station. We propose four different wait-and-see strategies that govern these waiting periods. We assume Poisson arrivals for new messages and allow general service and switchover time distributions. The results are formulas for the mean average queueing delay and characterizations of the cases where the wait-and-see strategies yield a lower delay compared with the exhaustive strategy.