Upper and lower bounds for the waiting time in the symmetric shortest queue system.

In this paper we compare the exponential symmetric shortest queue system with two related systems: the shortest queue system with Threshold Jockeying and the shortest queue system with Threshold Blocking. The latter two systems are easier to analyse and are shown to give tight lower and upper bounds respectively for the mean waiting time in the shortest queue system. The approach also gives bounds for the distribution of the total number of jobs in the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]