Critical random walks on two-dimensional complexes with applications to polling systems (Q1429109)

Consider a polling system in which costumers arrive at various nodes where they queue for service from a single server that visits the nodes. The server completes all the tasks queueing at a node and only then moves to another. The authors show that some variations of these problem can be interpreted as random walks on two-dimensional complexes. So, in the first part of the paper, they extensively analyze the properties of such processes. They give a classification of the long-term behavior of any given random walk (ergodicity, null-recurrence or transience) using only the first and second moments of the jumps and the return probabilities for some transient one-dimensional random walks. In the critical case, they also study the finiteness of moments of the first-hitting time of finite subsets. In the brief second part, some hints are given on how to apply the previous results to the case of polling systems where there are just two service nodes but the server is allowed to behave in a variety of ways, for instance, giving service simultaneously to both nodes.