Quantifying Fairness in Queueing Systems: Principles and Applications

Benjamin Avi-Itzhak	Hanoch Levy	David Raz

Abstract. A fundamental and important property of a queue service discipline is
its fairness. Recent empirical studies show fairness in queues to be highly
important to queueing customers in practical scenarios. Despite this importance
only little has been studied on this subject. The objective of this work is to
illuminate the queue fairness issue and its dilemmas, and to overview the
research conducted on this subject. We discuss the fundamental principles
related to queue fairness in the perspective of the relevant real-life
applications. The discussion is conducted in the context of a number of recently
proposed queue fairness measures. We describe, discuss and compare their
properties, and evaluate their relevance to the various practical applications.