Abstract
An analytical method is developed to analyze the performance of the join the shortest queue (JSQ) policy for systems with N identical queues, N>or=2. No simulation result is used to refine the analytical model. A birth-death Markov process is used to model the evolution of the total number of jobs in the system. An iterative procedure is developed to estimate the average service rates for different states. The average job response time is then obtained. Extensive simulations are performed to study the accuracy of the analysis. Results show that this method provides estimates within 3.5% of the average job response times for N up to 64.