11,261 research outputs found
Delay, memory, and messaging tradeoffs in distributed service systems
We consider the following distributed service model: jobs with unit mean,
exponentially distributed, and independent processing times arrive as a Poisson
process of rate , with , and are immediately dispatched
by a centralized dispatcher to one of First-In-First-Out queues associated
with identical servers. The dispatcher is endowed with a finite memory, and
with the ability to exchange messages with the servers.
We propose and study a resource-constrained "pull-based" dispatching policy
that involves two parameters: (i) the number of memory bits available at the
dispatcher, and (ii) the average rate at which servers communicate with the
dispatcher. We establish (using a fluid limit approach) that the asymptotic, as
, expected queueing delay is zero when either (i) the number of
memory bits grows logarithmically with and the message rate grows
superlinearly with , or (ii) the number of memory bits grows
superlogarithmically with and the message rate is at least .
Furthermore, when the number of memory bits grows only logarithmically with
and the message rate is proportional to , we obtain a closed-form expression
for the (now positive) asymptotic delay.
Finally, we demonstrate an interesting phase transition in the
resource-constrained regime where the asymptotic delay is non-zero. In
particular, we show that for any given (no matter how small), if our
policy only uses a linear message rate , the resulting asymptotic
delay is upper bounded, uniformly over all ; this is in sharp
contrast to the delay obtained when no messages are used (), which
grows as when , or when the popular
power-of--choices is used, in which the delay grows as
- …