The authors introduce a new service discipline, called the synchronized gated discipline, for polling systems. It arises when there are precedence (or synchronization) constraints between the order that jobs in different queues should be served. These constraints are described as follows: There are N stations which are ‘fathers’ of (zero or more) synchronized stations (‘children’). Jobs that arrive at synchronized stations have to be processed only after jobs that arrived prior to them at their corresponding ‘father’ station have been processed. The authors analyze the performance of the synchronized gated discipline and obtain expressions for the first two moments and the Laplace-Stieltjes transform (LST) of the waiting times in different stations, and expressions for the moments and LST of other quantities of interest, such as cycle duration and generalized station times. They also obtain a ‘pseudo’ conservation law for the synchronized gated discipline, and determine the optimal network topology that minimizes the weighted sum of the mean waiting times, as defined in the ‘pseudo’ conservation law. Numerical examples are given for illustrating the dependence of the performance of the synchronized gated discipline on different parameters of the network.
