ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to the study of a class of stochastic processes called renewal processes (RPs), and their applications. The RPs play several important roles in the grand scheme of stochastic processes. First, they help remove the stringent distributional assumptions that were needed to build Markov models, namely, the geometric distributions for the DTMCs, and the exponential distributions for the CTMCs. RPs provide us with important tools such as the key renewal theorem (Section 8.5) to deal with general distributions.
