A Lower Bound on the stability region of Redundancy-d with FIFO service discipline

Abstract: Redundancy-d (R(d)) is a load balancing method used to route incoming jobs to K servers, each with its own queue. Every arriving job is replicated into 2<=d<=K tasks, which are then routed to d servers chosen uniformly at random. When the first task finishes service, the remaining d-1 tasks are cancelled and the job departs the system. Despite the fact that R(d) is known, under certain conditions, to substantially improve job completion times compared to not using redundancy at all, little is known on a more fundamental performance criterion: what is the set of arrival rates under which the R(d) queueing system with FIFO service discipline is stable? In this context, due to the complex dynamics of systems with redundancy and cancellations, existing results are scarce and are limited to very special cases with respect to the joint service time distribution of tasks. In this paper we provide a non-trivial, closed form lower bound on the stability region of R(d) for a general joint service time distribution of tasks with finite first and second moments. We consider a discrete time system with Bernoulli arrivals and assume that jobs are processed by their order of arrival. We use the workload processes and a quadratic Lyapunov function to characterize the set of arrival rates for which the system is stable. While simulation results indicate our bound is not tight, it provides an easy-to-check performance guarantee.