Tail asymptotics for policies favoring short jobs in a many-flows regime

Abstract

Scheduling policies that prioritize short jobs have received growing attention in recent years. The class of SMART policies includes many such disciplines, e.g. Shortest-Remaining-Processing-Time (SRPT) and Preemptive-Shortest-Job-First (PSJF). In this work, we study the delay distribution of SMART policies and contrast this distribution with that of the Least-Attained-Service (LAS) policy, which indirectly favors short jobs by prioritizing jobs with the least attained service (age). We study the delay distribution (rate function) of LAS and the SMART class in a discrete-time queueing system under the many sources regime. Our analysis in this regime (large capacity and large number of flows) hinges on a novel two dimensional queue representation, which creates tie-break rules. These additional rules do not alter the policies, but greatly simplify their analysis. We demonstrate that the queue evolution of all the above policies can be described under this single two dimensional framework.We prove that all SMART policies have the same delay distribution as SRPT and illustrate the improvements SMART policies make over First-Come-First-Served (FCFS). Furthermore, we show that the delay distribution of SMART policies stochastically improves upon the delay distribution of LAS. However, the delay distribution under LAS is not too bad -- the distribution of delay under LAS for most jobs sizes still provides improvement over FCFS. Our results are complementary to prior work that studies delay-tail behavior in the large buffer regime under a single flow.

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