Heavy traffic queue length scaling in switches with reconfiguration delay

Abstract

The Adaptive MaxWeight policy achieves optimal throughput for switches with nonzero reconfiguration delay and has been shown to have good delay performance in simulation. In this paper, we analyze the queue length behavior of a switch with nonzero reconfiguration delay operating under the Adaptive MaxWeight. We first show that the Adaptive MaxWeight policy exhibits a weak state space collapse behavior in steady state, which can be viewed as an inheritance of a similar property of the MaxWeight policy in a switch with zero reconfiguration delay. The weak state space collapse result is then utilized to obtain an asymptotically tight bound on an expression involving the steady-state queue length and the probability of reconfiguration for the Adaptive MaxWeight policy in the heavy traffic regime. We then derive the relation between the expected schedule duration and the steady-state queue length through Lyapunov drift analysis and characterize bounds for the expected steady-state queue length. While the resulting queue length bounds are not asymptotically tight, they suggest an approximate queue length scaling behavior, which approaches the optimal scaling with respect to the traffic load and the reconfiguration delay when the hysteresis function of the Adaptive MaxWeight policy approaches a linear function.