WCFS: a new framework for analyzing multiserver systems

Multiserver queueing systems are found at the core of a wide variety of practical systems. Many important multiserver models have a previously-unexplained similarity: identical mean response time behavior is empirically observed in the heavy traffic limit. We explain this similarity for the first time. We do so by introducing the work-conserving finite-skip (WCFS) framework, which encompasses a broad class of important models. This class includes the heterogeneous M/G/k, the Limited Processor Sharing policy for the M/G/1, the Threshold Parallelism model and the Multiserver-Job model under a novel scheduling algorithm. We prove that for all WCFS models, scaled mean response time \(E[T](1-\rho )\) converges to the same value, \(E[S^2]/(2E[S])\), in the heavy-traffic limit, which is also the heavy traffic limit for the M/G/1/FCFS. Moreover, we prove additively tight bounds on mean response time for the WCFS class, which hold for all load \(\rho \). For each of the four models mentioned above, our bounds are the first known bounds on mean response time.