Stability of Parallel Server Systems

Abstract

A parallel server system is a queueing system in which jobs are routed upon their arrivals to one of several buffers, each handled by a different server. The main operational and theoretical problem in such systems is to find an efficient routing policy that maximizes their throughput (or minimizes waiting times). The paper “Stability of Parallel Server Systems” considers a large class of routing policies, which includes the most prevalent policies studies in the literature, under the assumption that routing errors may occur because ofincomplete information about the state of the system at decision epochs. The stability region for this class of policies is studied as a function of the error probability, and it is shown that the standard stability condition, namely, that the traffic intensity is smaller than one, does not guarantee that the system is stable.