THE INDIVIDUAL STATION TECHNIQUE FOR THE ANALYSIS OF CYCLIC POLLING SYSTEMS

Polling systems are used to model a wide variety of real-world applica tions, for example, telecommunication and material handling systems. C onsequently, there is continued interest in developing efficient algor ithms to analyze the performance of polling systems. Recent interest i n the optimization of these systems has brought up the need for develo ping very efficient techniques for analyzing their waiting times. This article presents the Individual Station technique for cyclic polling systems. The technique possesses the following features: (a) it allows the user to compute the mean waiting time at a selected station indep endent of the mean waiting time computations at other stations, and (b ) its complexity is low and independent of the system utilization. In addition the technique provides explicit closed-form expressions for ( i) the mean waiting times in a system with 3 stations, and (ii) the se cond moment of the waiting times in a system with 2 stations, for an e xhaustive service system. (C) 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.