CORS Queueing Prize for Jalal Khamse-Ashari
The winner of the Sixth Canadian Operational Research Society Queueing SIG Annual Student Paper Prize (that will be announced at the 60th Annual CORS Conference in Halifax, June 4-6, 2018) is Systems and Computer Engineering graduate student Jalal Khamse-Ashari, co-supervised by Ioannis Lambadaris and Yiqiang Q. Zhao, with the winning paper titled Constrained max-min fair scheduling of variable-length packet-flows to multiple servers, published in Annals of Telecommunications Journal in August 2017. This paper contains original work of high quality, in which novel results on multi-server fair queuing in a heterogeneous environment have been developed. The paper targeted a challenging area of research with great applicability in computer and communications networks, such as cloud computing. The paper identifies important shortcomings in a well-known algorithm recently proposed by researchers from the Stanford University. To address this problem, a new multi-server fair queuing algorithm which extends the so-called Deficit Round Robin (DRR) algorithm is proposed to achieve max-min fairness in such a constrained multi-server queuing system. The paper presents a solid mathematical approach and provides a sound description of its collocation with respect to existing work.