Decay of tails at equilibrium for FIFO join the shortest queue networks

In join the shortest queue networks, incoming jobs are assigned to the shortest queue from among a randomly chosen subset of D queues, in a system of N queues; after completion of service at its queue, a job leaves the network. We also assume that jobs arrive into the system according to a rate-.N Poisson process, .<1, with rate-1 service at each queue. When the service at queues is exponentially distributed, it was shown in Vvedenskaya et al. [Probl. Inf. Transm. 32 (1996) 15.29] that the tail of the equilibrium queue size decays doubly exponentially in the limit as N... This is a substantial improvement over the case D=1 , where the queue size decays exponentially. The reasoning in [Probl. Inf. Transm. 32 (1996) 15.29] does not easily generalize to jobs with nonexponential service time distributions. A modularized program for treating general service time distributions was introduced in Bramson et al. [In Proc. ACM SIGMETRICS (2010) 275.286]. The program relies on an ansatz that asserts, in equilibrium, any fixed number of queues become independent of one another as N.. . This ansatz was demonstrated in several settings in Bramson et al. [Queueing Syst. 71 (2012) 247.292], including for networks where the service discipline is FIFO and the service time distribution has a decreasing hazard rate. In this article, we investigate the limiting behavior, as N.. , of the equilibrium at a queue when the service discipline is FIFO and the service time distribution has a power law with a given exponent .., for .>1. We show under the above ansatz that, as N.., the tail of the equilibrium queue size exhibits a wide range of behavior depending on the relationship between . and D. In particular, if .>D/(D.1), the tail is doubly exponential and, if .<D/(D.1), the tail has a power law. When .=D/(D.1), the tail is exponentially distributed.