Heavy-Traffic Universality of Redundancy Systems with Assignment Constraints

Abstract

Modern service systems, like cloud computing platforms or data center environments, commonly face a high degree of heterogeneity. This heterogeneity is not only caused by different server speeds but also, by binding task-server relations that must be taken into account when assigning incoming tasks. Unfortunately, there are hardly any theoretical performance guarantees as these systems do not fall within the typical supermarket modeling framework which heavily relies on strong symmetry and homogeneity assumptions. In “Heavy-traffic universality of redundancy systems with assignment constraints,” Cardinaels, Borst, and van Leeuwaarden provide insight in the performance of these systems operating under redundancy scheduling policies. Surprisingly, when experiencing high demand, these systems exhibit state space collapse and can achieve a similar level of resource pooling and performance as a fully flexible system, even subject to quite strict task-server constraints.