Performance balancing size-interval routing policies

Abstract

We study a parallel-queue system with Poisson arrivals, in which a dispatcher sends the incoming traffic to K queues using Size Interval Task Assignment (SITA) policy that aims to equalize the performance of all queues. We study existence and uniqueness of the allocation thresholds for a large set of performance functions of the queues. We also provide a family of performance functions of the queues such that the performance of the system is characterized. For a particular case of the latter family of functions, we show that the performance of the SITA policy we study coincides with the performance of the SITA policy in which the load are balanced. We investigate the optimality of the SITA policy under study and, according to our numerical experiments, for FCFS queues and Bounded Pareto distributed job sizes, the SITA policy we study is almost optimal, when we consider the mean queue length and α < 1 as well as when we consider the mean slowdown.