Retrial queues with constant retrial times (Q6165519)

The paper under review studies a single server queueing system without buffer. Customers arrive in the queue according to a Poisson process with rate \(\lambda\) and immediately receive the service, if the server is available. If the server is busy, the customer joins the orbit and retries after a deterministic time \(S\). This process is repeated until the customer finds an idle server. The customer service times are deterministic as well, and service and retrial times are equal. Drawing on a time-discretisation approach and on an equivalence with polling systems, the authors find explicit expressions for the distribution of the number of retrials, and the probability generating function of the number of customers in orbit. While the state space of the queueing system at hand is complicated, the results are strikingly simple. The number of retrials follows a geometric distribution, while the orbit size decomposes into two independent random variables: the system content of the \(M/D/1\) queue at departure times and the orbit size of the \(M/D/1\) retrial queue, when the server is idle. The authors finally obtain explicit expressions for the retrial rate after a departure and for the distribution of the time until the \(n\)th retrial after a departure.