Analysis of the waiting time distribution for polling systems with retrials and glue periods

We consider a single-server multi-station polling system with retrials and glue periods. Just before the server arrives at a station, there is a deterministic glue period. During a glue period, arriving customers (either newly arriving customers or retrying customers) at the station stick in the queue of that station and will be served during the following service period of that station. Whereas during any other period, arriving customers at the station join the orbit of that station and will retry after an exponentially distributed time. In this paper, we derive the Laplace–Stieltjes transform of the waiting time distribution of an arbitrary customer. This transform allows us to obtain the mean and variance of the waiting time.