On the Analysis of a Symmetric Polling System with Single-Message Buffers

Abstract A performance analysis is provided for a polling system consisting of statistically identical stations with single-message buffers and Poisson arrival streams. Switchover and message service times are assumed to be generally distributed. Some errors in the past analysis are pointed out. We express such performance measures as the mean polling cycle time, the mean message response time, and the mean number of messages at an arbitrary time in terms of the mean number of massages served in a polling cycle. Our mean message response time reduces to that for an FCFS M/G/1//N queue (machine interference model) in the limit of zero switchover time.