Exploring Threshold-based Policies for Load Sharing

We consider the problem of how to design resource allocation policies that both provide good performance at predicted environmental conditions and are robust against changes or misprediction of the environmental conditions. We evaluate various common threshold-based allocation policies within a simple model, where there is a clear tradeoff between the (conflicting) goals of good performance and robustness. We then propose and evaluate a new threshold-based policy, ADT (adaptive dual thresholds), that achieves both the desired goals.