Marginal productivity index policies for scheduling a multiclass delay-/loss-sensitive queue

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling a Markovian multiclass queue with a finite dedicated buffer for each class, where class-dependent linear holding and rejection cost rates model differing levels of tolerance to delay and loss. The goal is to design well-grounded and tractable scheduling policies that nearly minimize expected total discounted or long-run average cost. New dynamic index policies are introduced, awarding higher priority to classes with larger index values, where a class’ index measures the marginal productivity of work at its current state. The results are obtained by deploying the work-cost analysis approach to marginal productivity indices (MPIs) for restless bandits developed by the author, which is extended to the bias criterion. The MPI furnishes new insights: for a loss-sensitive class, it is a decreasing function of the number of empty buffer spaces, independent of the buffer size; for a delay-sensitive class, it is a decreasing function of the queue length. Such opposite orderings show that preventive work is more valuable than reactive work for the latter classes, whereas the opposite holds for the former. The results of a computational study on two-class instances are reported, shedding light on how the MPI policy’s relative performance varies with each parameter. Parameter ranges are thus identified where the MPI policy is near optimal, and substantially outperforms conventional benchmark policies.