A preemptive priority retrial queue with two classes of customers and general retrial times

In this paper, we consider a continuous‐time retrial queue with two classes of customers: priority customers and ordinary customers, where priority customers don’t queue and have an exclusive preemptive priority to receive their services over ordinary customers. If an arriving ordinary customer finds the server busy, it enters a retrial group (called orbit) according to FCFS discipline. Only the ordinary customer at the head of the retrial queue is allowed to access the server. Firstly, we obtain the necessary and sufficient condition for the system to be stable by embedded Markov chain approach. Secondly, using supplementary variable method, we obtain the stationary probability distribution and some performance measures of interest. Thirdly, we give the analysis of the sojourn time in the system of an arbitrary ordinary customer. Lastly, numerical examples are given to show the effect of system parameters on several performance measures.