Large deviations for the empirical measure of Markov renewal processes

A large deviations principle is established for the joint law of the empirical measure and the flow measure of a renewal Markov process on a finite graph. We do not assume any bound on the arrival times, allowing heavy tailed distributions. In particular, the rate functional is in general degenerate (it has a nontrivial set of zeros) and not strictly convex. These features show a behavior highly different from what one may guess with a heuristic Donsker-Varadhan analysis of the problem