Analysis and Optimization of Polling Systems

The basic polling system is a system of multiple queues, attended to by a single server in a cyclic order. Polling systems arise naturally in the modelling of many communication, computer and production networks where several users compete for access to a common resource. Such applications also give rise to several variants of the basic polling system, like periodic polling; here the server visits the queues in a fixed order specified by a polling table in which each queue occurs at least once. The theory of polling systems is going through a period of feverish activity. The purpose of this paper is to stimulate the discussion on what are the really important problems, both from a theoretical and an applied pOint of view. It is argued that optimization of polling systems is one of those problems. Part of the paper is devoted to the analysis of a polling optimization problem, viz., the determination of that polling table in a periodic polling model that minimizes a certain weighted sum of the mean waiting times.