Designing Low-Complexity Heavy-Traffic Delay-Optimal Load Balancing Schemes
Abstract
We establish a unified analytical framework for designing load balancing algorithms that can simultaneously achieve low latency, low complexity, and low communication overhead. We first propose a general class ¶ of load balancing policies and prove that they are both throughput optimal and heavy-traffic delay optimal. This class ¶ includes popular policies such as join-shortest-queue (JSQ) and power-of- d as special cases, but not the recently proposed join-idle-queue (JIQ) policy. In fact, we show that JIQ is not heavy-traffic delay optimal even for homogeneous servers. By exploiting the flexibility offered by the class ¶, we design a new load balancing policy called join-below-threshold (JBT-d), in which the arrival jobs are preferentially assigned to queues that are no greater than a threshold, and the threshold is updated infrequently. JBT-d has several benefits: (i) JBT-d belongs to the class ¶i and hence is throughput optimal and heavy-traffic delay optimal. (ii) JBT-d has zero dispatching delay, like JIQ and other pull-based policies, and low message overhead due to infrequent threshold updates. (iii) Extensive simulations show that JBT-d has good delay performance, comparable to the JSQ policy in various system settings.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jun 12, 2018
- Source ID
- 10.1145/3292040.3219670
Entities
People
- Fei Wu
- Jian Tan
- Ness Shroff
- Xingyu Zhou
- Yin Sun
Organizations
- Army Research Office
- Auburn University
- National Science Foundation
- Office of Naval Research
- Ohio State University