Novel Heavy-Traffic Regimes for Large-Scale Service Systems

Abstract

We introduce a family of heavy-traffic regimes for large-scale service systems, presenting a range of scalings that include both moderate and extreme heavy traffic, as compared to classical heavy traffic. The heavy-traffic regimes can be translated into capacity sizing rules that lead to economies-of-scales, so that the system utilization approaches 100% while congestion remains limited. We obtain heavy-traffic approximations for stationary performance measures in terms of asymptotic expansions, using a nonstandard saddle point method, tailored to the specific form of integral expressions for the performance measures, in combination with the heavy-traffic regimes.