Retrial queue with discipline of adaptive permanent pooling

A novel customer service discipline for a single-server retrial queue is proposed and analysed. Arriving customers are accumulated in a pool of finite capacity. Customers arriving when the pool is full go into orbit and attempt to access the service later. It is assumed that customers access the service as a group. The size of the group is defined by the number of customers in the pool at the instant the service commences. All customers within a group finish receiving the service simultaneously. If the pool is full at the point the service finishes, a new service begins immediately and all customers from the pool begin to be served. Otherwise, the customer admission period starts. The duration of this period is random and depends on the number of customers in the pool when the admission period begins. However, if the pool becomes full before the admission period expires, this period is terminated and a new service begins. The system behaviour is described by a multi-dimensional Markov chain. The generator and the condition of ergodicity of this Markov chain are derived, and an algorithm for computing the stationary probability distribution of the states of the Markov chain is given. Formulas for computing various performance measures of the system are presented, and the results of numerical experiments show that these measures essentially depend on the capacity of the pool and the distribution of the duration of the admission period. The advantages of the proposed customer service discipline over the classical discipline and the discipline in which customers cannot enter the pool during the service period are illustrated numerically. © 2017 Elsevier Inc.