We study the delay in asymmetric cyclic polling models with general mixtures of gated and exhaustive service, with generally distributed service times and switch-over times, and in which batches of customers may arrive simultaneously at the different queues. We show that (1 − ρ)Xi converges to a gamma distribution with known parameters as the offered load ρ tends to unity, where Xi is the steady-state length of queue i at an arbitrary polling instant at that queue. The result is shown to lead to closed-form expressions for the Laplace–Stieltjes transform of the waiting-time distributions at each of the queues (under proper scalings), in a general parameter setting. The results show explicitly how the distribution of the delay depends on the system parameters, and in particular, on the simultaneity of the arrivals. The results also suggest simple and fast approximations for the tail probabilities and the moments of the delay in stable polling systems, explicitly capturing the impact of the correlation structure in the arrival processes. Numerical experiments indicate that the approximations are accurate for medium and heavily loaded systems.
