Effect of proactive serving on user delay reduction in service systems

Abstract

In online service systems, delay experienced by a user from the service request to the service completion is one of the most critical performance metrics. To improve user delay experience, in this paper, we investigate a novel aspect of system design: proactive serving, where the system can predict future user request arrivals and allocate its capacity to serve these upcoming requests proactively. In particular, we investigate the average user delay under proactive serving from a queuing theory perspective. We show that proactive serving reduces the average user delay exponentially (as a function of the prediction window size) under M/M/1 queueing models. Our simulation results show that, for G/G/1 queueing models, the average user delay also decreases significantly under proactive serving.