On The Performance of A Suboptimal Assignment Policy in N-Queue m-Server System

Consider N queues without arrivals and with m identical servers. All jobs are independent and service requirements of jobs in a queue are i.i.d. random variables. At any time only one server may be assigned to a queue and switching between queues are allowed. A unit cost is imposed per job per unit time. The objective is to minimized the expected total cost. An flow approximation model is considered and an upperbound for the percentage error of best nonswitching policies to an optimal policy is found. It is shown that the best nonswitching policy is not worse than $11\%$ of an optimal policy For the stochastic model, we consider the case in which the service requirements of all jobs are i.i.d. with an exponential distribution. A longest first policy is shown to be optimal and a worst case analysis shows that the nonswitching policy which starts with the longest queues is not worse than $11\%$ of the optimal policy.