Scheduling in polling systems

We present a simple mean value analysis   (MVA) framework for analyzing the effect of scheduling within queues in classical asymmetric polling systems with gated or exhaustive service. Scheduling in polling systems finds many applications in computer and communication systems. Our framework leads not only to unification but also to extension of the literature studying scheduling in polling systems. It illustrates that a large class of scheduling policies behaves similarly in the exhaustive polling model and the standard M/GI/1M/GI/1 model, whereas scheduling policies in the gated polling model behave very differently than in an M/GI/1M/GI/1.