Vacation models in discrete time

A class of single server vacation queues which have single arrivals and non-batch service is considered in discrete time. It is shown that provided the interarrival, service, vacation, and server operational times can be cast with Markov-based representation then this class of vacation model can be studied as a matrix–geometric or a matrix-product problem – both in the matrix–analytic family – thereby allowing us to use well established results from Neuts (1981). Most importantly it is shown that using discrete time approach to study some vacation models is more appropriate and makes the models much more algorithmically tractable. An example is a vacation model in which the server visits the queue for a limited duration. The paper focuses mainly on single arrival and single unit service systems which result in quasi-birth-and-death processes. The results presented in this paper are applicable to all this class of vacation queues provided the interarrival, service, vacation, and operational times can be represented by a finite state Markov chain.An erratum to this article can be found at