Efficient analysis of polling systems

A large variety of computer communications systems, in particular the token ring network, are modeled and analyzed as polling systems. The authors present the descendant set approach as a general efficient algorithm for deriving all moments of packet delay (in particular, mean delay) in these systems. The method can apply to a very large variety of model variations including: the exhaustive, gated, and fractional service policies; the cyclic visit order; arbitrary periodic visit orders, (polling tables); random polling orders; and customer routing. For most variations the method significantly outperforms the algorithms commonly used