A Polling Model with Multiple Priority Levels

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a single-server cyclic polling system with multiple priority levels, examining various service disciplines and deriving distributions for cycle time, waiting times, and queue lengths.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of a polling system with multiple priority levels under different service disciplines, including new distribution results.

Findings

Derived cycle time distribution for the system

Obtained waiting time distributions for each priority class

Analyzed joint queue length distributions at polling epochs

Abstract

In this paper we consider a single-server cyclic polling system. Between visits to successive queues, the server is delayed by a random switch-over time. The order in which customers are served in each queue is determined by a priority level that is assigned to each customer at his arrival. For this situation the following service disciplines are considered: gated, exhaustive, and globally gated. We study the cycle time distribution, the waiting times for each customer type, the joint queue length distribution of all priority classes at all queues at polling epochs, and the steady-state marginal queue length distributions for each customer type.