Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2016
A model for the service time structure in the single server queue is given embodying correlations between contiguous and near-contiguous service times. A number of results are derived in the case of Poisson arrivals both for equilibrium and the transient state. In particular, Kendall's (equilibrium) result P (a departure leaves the queue empty) = 1 — (mean service time)/(mean inter-arrival time) is found still to hold good. The effect of the correlation on the mean and variance of the equilibrium queue length distribution is examined in a simple case.