Retrial Queues: Scaling Limits
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Abstract
Retrial queues arise in various applications such as call centers, services, and computer networks. The study of retrial queues is an important research branch of Queueing Theory. Retrial queues are characterized by the feature that customers who cannot receive service upon arrival do not queue but retry to enter the server after some random time. This makes the analysis of retrial queues more difficult than that of corresponding models without retrials. While the latter can be considered the limit of the former as the retrial time tends to infinity, some scaling limits are needed to obtain a scaled version of the number of retrial customers as the retrial time tends to zero, because the number of retrial customers explodes under this limiting regime. In this paper, a brief survey is provided on the major scaling limits of these models, and open problems are discussed. These limits can be used as approximations of complex systems with retrials.
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References
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TY - JOUR AU - Phung-Duc, Tuan PY - 2026 DA - 2026/04/30 TI - Retrial Queues: Scaling Limits JO - Journal of Systems Scalability T2 - Journal of Systems Scalability JF - Journal of Systems Scalability VL - 1 IS - 2 SP - 39 EP - 42 DO - 10.62762/JSS.2025.500072 UR - https://www.icck.org/article/abs/JSS.2025.500072 KW - scaling limits KW - fluid limit KW - diffusion limit KW - heavy traffic KW - retrial queues KW - networks AB - Retrial queues arise in various applications such as call centers, services, and computer networks. The study of retrial queues is an important research branch of Queueing Theory. Retrial queues are characterized by the feature that customers who cannot receive service upon arrival do not queue but retry to enter the server after some random time. This makes the analysis of retrial queues more difficult than that of corresponding models without retrials. While the latter can be considered the limit of the former as the retrial time tends to infinity, some scaling limits are needed to obtain a scaled version of the number of retrial customers as the retrial time tends to zero, because the number of retrial customers explodes under this limiting regime. In this paper, a brief survey is provided on the major scaling limits of these models, and open problems are discussed. These limits can be used as approximations of complex systems with retrials. SN - 3142-7855 PB - Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge LA - English ER -
@article{PhungDuc2026Retrial,
author = {Tuan Phung-Duc},
title = {Retrial Queues: Scaling Limits},
journal = {Journal of Systems Scalability},
year = {2026},
volume = {1},
number = {2},
pages = {39-42},
doi = {10.62762/JSS.2025.500072},
url = {https://www.icck.org/article/abs/JSS.2025.500072},
abstract = {Retrial queues arise in various applications such as call centers, services, and computer networks. The study of retrial queues is an important research branch of Queueing Theory. Retrial queues are characterized by the feature that customers who cannot receive service upon arrival do not queue but retry to enter the server after some random time. This makes the analysis of retrial queues more difficult than that of corresponding models without retrials. While the latter can be considered the limit of the former as the retrial time tends to infinity, some scaling limits are needed to obtain a scaled version of the number of retrial customers as the retrial time tends to zero, because the number of retrial customers explodes under this limiting regime. In this paper, a brief survey is provided on the major scaling limits of these models, and open problems are discussed. These limits can be used as approximations of complex systems with retrials.},
keywords = {scaling limits, fluid limit, diffusion limit, heavy traffic, retrial queues, networks},
issn = {3142-7855},
publisher = {Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge}
}
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Copyright © 2026 by the Author(s). Published by Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.