39.
We study the expected delay in cyclic polling models with general ‘branching-type’ service disciplines. For this class of
models, which contains models with exhaustive and gated service as special cases, we obtain closed-form expressions for the
expected delay under standard heavy-traffic scalings. We identify a single parameter associated with the service discipline
at each queue, which we call the ‘exhaustiveness’. We show that the scaled expected delay figures depend on the service policies
at the queues only through the exhaustiveness of each of the service disciplines. This implies that the influence of different
service disciplines, but with the same exhaustiveness, on the expected delays at the queues becomes the same when the system
reaches saturation. This observation leads to a new classification of the service disciplines. In addition, we show monotonicity
of the scaled expected delays with respect to the exhaustiveness of the service disciplines. This induces a complete ordering
in terms of efficiency of the service disciplines. The results also lead to new rules for optimization of the system performance
with respect to the service disciplines at the queues. Further, the exact asymptotic results suggest simple expected waiting-time
approximations for polling models in heavy traffic. Numerical experiments show that the accuracy of the approximations is
excellent for practical heavy-traffic scenarios.
This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.
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