Universality of load balancing schemes on diffusion scale

Abstract

We consider a system of N parallel queues with identical exponential service rates and a single dispatcher where tasks arrive as a Poisson process. When a task arrives, the dispatcher always assigns it to an idle server, if there is any, and to a server with the shortest queue among d randomly selected servers otherwise (1≤d≤N). This load balancing scheme subsumes the so-called join-the-idle queue policy (d=1) and the celebrated join-the-shortest queue policy (d=N) as two crucial special cases. We develop a stochastic coupling construction to obtain the diffusion limit of the queue process in the Halfin‒Whitt heavy-traffic regime, and establish that it does not depend on the value of d, implying that assigning tasks to idle servers is sufficient for diffusion level optimality.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.