The Impact of Retrials on the Performance of Self-Organizing Systems

This article describes the application of the theory of retrial queues in capturing certain aspects of self-organizing behavior that arises, for example, in Peer-to-Peer networks. It can be shown that retrials have a fair effect on the performance of such self-organizing systems, and thus, should be taken into account adequately during the design and evaluation of these systems. Moreover, it can be shown that there is a notable difference between finitesource and infinite-source retrial queueing models. The main goal of this paper is to show the practical applicability of retrial queues and some of their varieties.