Queueing systems with vacations — A survey

Queueing systems in which the server works on primary and secondary (vacation) customers arise in many computer, communication, production and other stochastic systems. These systems can frequently be modeled as queueing systems with vacations. In this survey, we give an overview of some general decomposition results and the methodology used to obtain these results for two vacation models. We also show how other related models can be solved in terms of the results for these basic models. We attempt to provide a methodological overview with the objective of illustrating how the seemingly diverse mix of problems is closely related in structure and can be understood in a common framework.