An approximate analysis of a cyclic server queue with limited service and reservations

In this paper, we examine a queueing problem motivated by the pipeline polling protocol in satellite communications. The model is an extension of the cyclic queueing system withM-limited service. In this service mechanism, each queue, after receiving service on cyclej, makes a reservation for its service requirement in cyclej + 1. The main contribution to queueing theory is that we propose an approximation for the queue length and sojourn-time distributions for this discipline. Most approximate studies on cyclic queues, which have been considered before, examine the means only. Our method is an iterative one, which we prove to be convergent by using stochastic dominance arguments. We examine the performance of our algorithm by comparing it to simulations and show that the results are very good.