L. Tassiulas et A. Ephremides, DYNAMIC SERVER ALLOCATION TO PARALLEL QUEUES WITH RANDOMLY VARYING CONNECTIVITY, IEEE transactions on information theory, 39(2), 1993, pp. 466-478
Consider N parallel queues competing for the attention of a single ser
ver. At each time slot each queue may be connected to the server or no
t depending on the value of a binary random variable, the connectivity
variable. The server is allocated to one of the connected queues at e
ach slot; the allocation decision is based on the connectivity informa
tion and on the lengths of the connected queues only. At the end of ea
ch slot, service may be completed with a given fixed probability. Such
a queueing model is appropriate for some communication networks with
changing topology (radio networks with mobile users, or networks with
variable links such as meteor-burst communication channels). In the ca
se of infinite buffers, necessary and sufficient conditions are obtain
ed for stabilizability of the system in terms of the different system
parameters. The allocation policy that serves the longest connected qu
eue stabilizes the system when the stabilizability conditions hold. Th
e same policy minimizes the delay for the special case of symmetric qu
eues (i.e., queues with equal arrival, service, and connectivity stati
stics) is provided. In a system with a single buffer per queue, an all
ocation policy is obtained that maximizes the throughput and minimizes
the delay when the arrival and service statistics of different queues
are identical.