Renewal Processes

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 distribu-

tional 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.