Heavy Traffic Joint Queue Length Distribution without Resource Pooling

Abstract

This paper studies the heavy-traffic joint distribution of queue lengths in two stochastic processing networks (SPN), viz., an input-queued switch operating under the MaxWeight scheduling policy and a two-server parallel server system called the $\mathcal{N}$-system. These two systems serve as representatives of SPNs that do not satisfy the so-called Complete Resource Pooling (CRP) condition, and consequently exhibit a multidimensional State Space Collapse (SSC). Except in special cases, only mean queue lengths of such non-CRP systems is known in the literature. In this paper, we develop the Transform method to study the joint distribution of queue lengths in non-CRP systems. The key challenge is in solving an implicit functional equation involving the Laplace transform of the heavy-traffic limiting distribution. For the $\mathcal{N}$-system and a special case of an input-queued switch involving only three queues, we obtain the exact limiting heavy-traffic joint distribution in terms of a linear combination of two iid exponentials. For the general $n\times n$ input-queued switch that has $n^2$ queues, under a conjecture on uniqueness of the solution of the functional equation, we obtain an exact joint distribution of the heavy-traffic limiting queue-lengths in terms of a non-linear combination of $2n$ iid exponentials.