We analyze the service times of customers in a stable M/M/1 queue in equilibrium depending on their position in a busy period. We give the law of the service of a customer at the beginning, at the end, or in the middle of the busy period. It enables as a by-product to prove that the process of instants of beginning of services is not Poisson. We then proceed to a more precise analysis. We consider a family of polynomial generating series associated with Dyck paths of length 2
n and we show that they provide the correlation function of the successive services in a busy period with
n+1 customers.
Keywords M/M/1 queue - busy period - Dyck paths
AMS subject classification 60K25 - 68R05