From Polling to Snowplowing

We study the limiting behavior of gated polling systems, as their dimension (the number of queues) tends to infinity, while the system's total incoming workflow and total switchover time (per cycle) remain unchanged. The polling systems are assumed asymmetric, with incoming workflow obeying general Lévy statistics, and with general inter-dependent switchover times. We prove convergence, in law, to a limiting polling system on the circle. The derivation is based on an asymptotic analysis of the stochastic Poincaré maps of the polling systems. The obtained polling limit is identified as a snowplowing system on the circle—whose evolution, steady-state equilibrium, and statistics have been recently investigated and are known.