Performing Load Balancing under Constraints

Join-the-shortest queue (JSQ) and its variants have often been used in solving load balancing problems. The aim of such policies is to minimize the average system occupation, e.g., the customer's system time. In this paper, we extend the load balancing setting to include constraints that may be imposed, e.g., due to the communication network. First, we cast the problem in the framework of constrained MDPs: this permits us to address both action-dependent constraints, such as, e.g, bandwidth limitation, and state-dependent constraints, such as, e.g., minimum queue utilization. Hence, unlike the state-of-the-art approaches in load balancing, we derive new policies that satisfy the constraints while minimizing system occupancy. Extensive numerical simulations have evaluated their performance under various system settings.