Stationary analysis of the Shortest Queue First service policy

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed stationary analysis of the Shortest Queue First (SQF) service policy in a two-queue system, deriving functional equations for workload distributions and revealing tail behavior similar to preemptive priority systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel functional equation framework for analyzing the SQF discipline, especially in symmetric cases, and characterizes workload tail distributions and empty queue probabilities.

Findings

Derived functional equations for workload Laplace transforms.

Established the tail distribution matches that of preemptive priority systems.

Analyzed the analyticity domain and series expansion of key functions.

Abstract

We analyze the so-called Shortest Queue First (SQF) queueing discipline whereby a unique server addresses queues in parallel by serving at any time that queue with the smallest workload. Considering a stationary system composed of two parallel queues and assuming Poisson arrivals and general service time distributions, we first establish the functional equations satisfied by the Laplace transforms of the workloads in each queue. We further specialize these equations to the so-called "symmetric case", with same arrival rates and identical exponential service time distributions at each queue; we then obtain a functional equation $$ M(z) = q(z) \cdot M \circ h(z) + L(z) $$ for unknown function $M$, where given functions $q$, $L$ and $h$ are related to one branch of a cubic polynomial equation. We study the analyticity domain of function $M$ and express it by a series expansion involving all iterates of function $h$. This allows us to determine empty queue probabilities along with the tail of the workload distribution in each queue. This tail appears to be identical to that of the Head-of-Line preemptive priority system, which is the key feature desired for the SQF discipline.