Steady-State Analysis of Load Balancing with Coxian-$2$ Distributed Service Times


Abstract in English

This paper studies load balancing for many-server ($N$ servers) systems. Each server has a buffer of size $b-1,$ and can have at most one job in service and $b-1$ jobs in the buffer. The service time of a job follows the Coxian-2 distribution. We focus on steady-state performance of load balancing policies in the heavy traffic regime such that the normalized load of system is $lambda = 1 - N^{-alpha}$ for $0<alpha<0.5.$ We identify a set of policies that achieve asymptotic zero waiting. The set of policies include several classical policies such as join-the-shortest-queue (JSQ), join-the-idle-queue (JIQ), idle-one-first (I1F) and power-of-$d$-choices (Po$d$) with $d=O(N^alphalog N)$. The proof of the main result is based on Steins method and state space collapse. A key technical contribution of this paper is the iterative state space collapse approach that leads to a simple generator approximation when applying Steins method.

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