906 research outputs found
Queuing with future information
We study an admissions control problem, where a queue with service rate
receives incoming jobs at rate , and the decision maker is
allowed to redirect away jobs up to a rate of , with the objective of
minimizing the time-average queue length. We show that the amount of
information about the future has a significant impact on system performance, in
the heavy-traffic regime. When the future is unknown, the optimal average queue
length diverges at rate , as . In sharp contrast, when all future arrival and service times are revealed
beforehand, the optimal average queue length converges to a finite constant,
, as . We further show that the finite limit of
can be achieved using only a finite lookahead window starting from the current
time frame, whose length scales as , as
. This leads to the conjecture of an interesting duality between
queuing delay and the amount of information about the future.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AAP973 the Annals of
Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
- β¦