The Power of Two Choices with Load Comparison Errors

In this paper, we analyze the effects of erroneous load comparisons on the performance of the Po2 scheme. Specifically, we consider {\em load-dependent} and {\em load-independent} errors. In the load-dependent error model, an incoming job is sent to the server with the larger queue length among the two sampled servers with an error probability $\epsilon$ if the difference in the queue lengths of the two sampled servers is less than or equal to a constant $g$; no error is made if the queue-length difference is higher than $g$. For this type of errors, we show that the benefits of the Po2 scheme is retained as long as the system size is sufficiently large and $\lambda$ is sufficiently close to $1$. Furthermore, we show that, unlike the standard Po2 scheme, the performance of the Po2 scheme under this type of errors can be worse than the random scheme if $\epsilon > 1/2$ and $\lambda$ is sufficiently small. In the load-independent error model, the incoming job is sent to the sampled server with the {\em maximum load} with an error probability of $\epsilon$ independent of the loads of the sampled servers. For this model, we show that the performance benefits of the Po2 scheme are retained only if $\epsilon \leq 1/2$; for $\epsilon > 1/2$ we show that the stability region of the system reduces and the system performs poorly in comparison to the {\em random scheme}.