Heavy-Traffic Universality of Redundancy Systems with Assignment Constraints

Modern service systems, like cloud computing platforms or data center environments, commonly face a high degree of heterogeneity. This heterogeneity is not only caused by different server speeds but also, binding task-server relations that must be taken into account when assigning incoming tasks. Unfortunately, there are hardly any theoretical performance guarantees as these systems do fall within the typical supermarket modeling framework which heavily relies on strong symmetry and homogeneity assumptions. In “Heavy-traffic universality redundancy with assignment constraints,” Cardinaels, Borst, van Leeuwaarden provide insight in operating under scheduling policies. Surprisingly, experiencing demand, exhibit state space collapse can achieve similar level resource pooling fully flexible system, even subject to quite strict constraints.