The Impact of Queue Length Information on Buffer Overflow in Parallel Queues

The authors consider a system consisting of N parallel queues, served by one server. Time is slotted, and the server serves one of the queues in each time slot, according to some scheduling policy. In the first part of the paper, they characterize the buffer overflow exponents and the likeliest overflow trajectories under the Longest Queue First (LQF) scheduling policy. Under statistically identical arrivals to each queue, they show that the buffer overflow exponent can be simply expressed in terms of the total system occupancy exponent of m parallel queues, for some m ¡Ü N.