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The Effect of Increasing Routing Choice on Resource Pooling

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2009

Stephen R.E. Turner
Affiliation:
Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge CB2 1SB, England

Abstract

We consider a network of N identical /M/l or /M/∞ queues. There are two types of arriving customers, those that have no routing choice, and those that first pick r queues at random, and are then routed to the least busy of those queues. We derive the limiting distribution of queue lengths as N→∞, and investigate how this distribution varies with r. We show that even a small amount of routing choice can lead to substantial gains in performance through resource pooling. We corroborate these conclusions by carrying out some simulations of a related model, from which the previous model can be derived by an exchangeable queue simplification. We also observe that the exchangeable queue simplification results in a performance gain for some parameters, in contrast to earlier work.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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