Improving service in the presence of surge traffic: a K-policy voluntary flushing queueing system

Unexpected surge in online services causes poor performance and makes it challenging for the service provider to differentiate and serve genuine users. In this paper, we propose a novel approach using voluntary flushing to mitigate disruptions caused by surge traffic, such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on e-commerce websites. Voluntary flushing of customers has never been modeled because flushing was perceived negatively for customer service. We show that it may not be the case in today’s online services. We propose three queueing performance measures to evaluate the system and present optimal policies for flushing under various scenarios. We use DDoS attacks as use-case to present numerical analysis and discuss the implications of the flushing policies.