For a broad class of polling models the evolution of the system at specific embedded polling instants is known to constitute a multi-type branching process (MTBP) with immigration. In this paper it is shown that for this class of polling models the vector that describes the state of the system at these polling instants, say X = (X 1 , . . . , X M ), satisfies the following heavy-traffic behavior (under mild assumptions):where γ is a known M-dimensional vector, (α, μ) has a gamma-distribution with known parameters α and μ, and where ρ is the load of the system. This general and powerful result is shown to lead to exact-and in many cases even closed-form-expressions for the Laplace-Stieltjes Transform (LST) of the complete asymptotic queue-length and waiting-time distributions for a broad class of branchingtype polling models that includes many well-studied polling models policies as special cases. The results generalize and unify many known results on the waiting times in polling systems in heavy traffic, and moreover, lead to new exact results for classical polling models that have not been Part of this research has been funded by the Dutch BSIK/BRICKS project.observed before. To demonstrate the usefulness of the results, we derive closed-form expressions for the LST of the waiting-time distributions for models with cyclic globallygated polling regimes, and for cyclic polling models with general branching-type service policies. As a by-product, our results lead to a number of asymptotic insensitivity properties, providing new fundamental insights in the behavior of polling models.

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We consider polling systems with mixtures of exhaustive and gated service in which the server visits the queues periodically according to a general polling table. We derive exact expressions for the steady-state delay incurred at each of the queues under standard heavy-traffic scalings. The expressions require the solution of a set of only M—N linear equations, where M is the length of the polling table and N is the number of queues, but are otherwise explicit. The equations can even be expressed in closed form for several routeing schemes commonly used in practice, such as the star and elevator visit order, in a general parameter setting. The results reveal a number of asymptotic properties of the behavior of polling systems. In addition, the results lead to simple and fast approximations for the distributions and the moments of the delay in stable polling systems with periodic server routeing. Numerical results demonstrate that the approximations are highly accurate for medium and heavily loaded systems.

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Abstract.We consider an asymmetric cyclic polling system with general service-time and switch-over time distributions with so-called twostage gated service at each queue, an interleaving scheme that aims to enforce fairness among the different customer classes. For this model, we (1) obtain a pseudo-conservation law, (2) describe how the mean delay at each of the queues can be obtained recursively via the so-called Descendant Set Approach, and (3) present a closed-form expression for the expected delay at each of the queues when the load tends to unity (under proper heavy-traffic scalings), which is the main result of this paper. The results are strikingly simple and provide new insights into the behavior of two-stage polling systems, including several insensitivity properties of the asymptotic expected delay with respect to the system parameters. Moreover, the results provide insight in the delay-performance of two-stage gated polling compared to the classical one-stage gated service policies. The results show that the two-stage gated service policy indeed leads to better fairness compared to one-stage gated service, at the expense of a decrease in efficiency. Finally, the results also suggest simple and fast approximations for the expected delay in stable polling systems. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the approximations are highly accurate for moderately and heavily loaded systems.

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