Polling systems have been widely studied, however most of these studies focus on polling systems with renewal processes for arrivals and random variables for service times. There is a need driven by practical applications to study polling systems with arbitrary arrivals (not restricted to time-varying or in batches) and revealed service time upon a job's arrival. To address that need, our work considers a polling system with generic setting and for the first time provides the worst-case analysis for online scheduling policies in this system. We provide conditions for the existence of constant competitive ratios, and competitive lower bounds for general scheduling policies in polling systems. Our work also bridges the queueing and scheduling communities by proving the competitive ratios for several well-studied policies in the queueing literature, such as cyclic policies with exhaustive, gated or l-limited service disciplines for polling systems.

中文翻译：

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关于投票系统的竞争分析

轮询系统已被广泛研究，但是这些研究大多集中在轮询系统上，该系统具有到达更新过程和服务时间随机变量。在实际应用的推动下，需要研究具有任意到达（不限于时变或成批）和在作业到达时显示服务时间的轮询系统。为了满足这一需求，我们的工作考虑了具有通用设置的轮询系统，并首次为该系统中的在线调度策略提供了最坏情况分析。我们为轮询系统中的一般调度策略提供了恒定竞争比率和竞争下界存在的条件。