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 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.