Bounding Mean Slowdown in Multiserver Systems

Abstract

Recent progress in queueing theory has made it possible to analyze the mean response time of multiserver queueing systems under advanced scheduling policies. However, this progress has so far been limited to the metric of mean response time. In practice, there are a wide variety of other metrics that can be more important. One such metric is mean slowdown, which is the average ratio between a job's response time and its size. While it is known that the "RS" policy minimizes mean slowdown in the single-server M/G/1, the problem is open for multiserver systems, including the M/G/k and load-balancing systems.