For a broad class of polling models the evolution of the system at specific embedded polling instants is known to constitute a multi-type branching process (MTBP) with immigration. In this paper it is shown that for this class of polling models the vector that describes the state of the system at these polling instants, say X = (X1, . . . ,XM), satisfies the following heavy-traffic behavior (un...

According to federal law, polling places must be accessible to persons with disabilities. The rate of compliance with these laws, however, is not known. Our purpose was to determine whether polling places in the Greater Kansas City area were physically accessible to persons with disabilities. Students, faculty, and staff members from four professional programs representing two universities comp...

The trend of dynamically interconnecting the personal devices that people carry with them has led to the introduction of personal area networks (PANs) and personal networks (PNs). The Bluetooth wireless access technology is believed to be a potential enabler of PANs and PNs. This dissertation focuses on Bluetooth intrapiconet scheduling (also referred to as Bluetooth polling) that helps in maki...

Polling policies have been introduced to simplify the accessing process in client/server systems by a centralized control access scheme. This paper considers a client/server model which employs a polling policy as its access strategy. We propose a learning-automata-based approach for polling in order to improve the throughput-delay performance of the system. Each client has an associated queue ...

This paper uses the consolidation of polling places in Los Angeles County during the October 2003 gubernatorial recall election to study the costs of voting. The consolidation afforded an opportunity to observe a natural experiment: those whose polling places were changed in the consolidation should be statistically comparable to those whose polling places are not changed. Thus, we may observe ...

Polling systems with large deterministic setup times find many applications in production environments. The present note studies the delay distribution in exhaustive polling systems when the setup times tend to infinity. Based on the recently proposed mean value analysis (MVA) for polling systems, a novel simple approach is developed to show that the scaled delay distribution converges to a uni...

Two strategies for supporting asynchronous interrupts are: the use of the processor's hardware interrupt system and the use of polling. The advantages of polling include: portabil-ity, simplicity, and low cost for handling interrupts. Unfortunately , polling has an overhead for the explicit interrupt checks inserted in the code. This paper describes balanced polling, a method for placing the in...

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 system...