Stability and performance of greedy server systems A review and open problems

摘要

Consider a queueing system in which arriving customers are placed on a circle and wait for service. A traveling server moves at constant speed on the circle, stopping at the location of the customers until service completion. The server is greedy: always moving in the direction of the nearest customer. Coffman and Gilbert conjectured that this system is stable if the traffic intensity is smaller than 1; however, a proof or counterexample remains unknown. In this review, we present a picture of the current state of this conjecture and suggest new related open problems.