Server Saturation in Skewed Networks

We consider a model inspired by compatibility constraints that arise between tasks and servers in data centers, cloud computing systems and content delivery networks. The constraints are represented by a bipartite graph or network that interconnects dispatchers with compatible servers. Each dispatcher receives tasks over time and sends every task to a compatible server with the least number of tasks, or to a server with the least number of tasks among compatible servers selected uniformly at random. We focus on networks where the neighborhood of at least one server is skewed in a limiting regime. This means that a diverging number of dispatchers are in the neighborhood which are each compatible with a uniformly bounded number of servers; thus, the degree of the central server approaches infinity while the degrees of many neighboring dispatchers remain bounded. We prove that each server with a skewed neighborhood saturates, in the sense that the mean number of tasks queueing in front of it in steady state approaches infinity. Paradoxically, this pathological behavior can even arise in random networks where nearly all the servers have at most one task in the limit.