The paging drum queue: A uniform perspective and further results (Q792089)

A uniform perspective for the performance analysis of drums organised around the sector concept under Poisson input is presented which allows further results on their operating characteristics to be naturally derived. Closed-form expressions are provided for (i) the mean device service time, (ii) the device utilisation, (iii) the drum efficiency, (iv) the mean device busy period, and (v) the mean number of page transfers per busy period. Both the FCFS and SLTF scheduling disciplines are studied. When the number of sectors per track is large, it is shown that some of the above quantities could be approximated by extremely simple asymptotic formulae if a suitable time unit is adopted. Generalizations of some of these results which are applicable to the performance analysis of solid-state secondary memory and certain computer communications systems - the polling server and the token ring - are also presented.