Abstract
Queues serve as a major scheduling device in computer networks, both at the network level and at the application level. 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. The objective of this tutorial is to discuss the issue of queue fairness and its dilemmas, and to review the research conducted on this subject. We discuss the fundamental principles related to queue fairness in the perspective of the relevant applications, with some emphasis on computer communications networks. This is conducted in the context of the recent research in this area and the queueing related fairness measures which have been proposed in recent years. We describe, discuss and compare their properties, and evaluate their relevance to the various practical applications.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Avi-Itzhak, B., Levy, H.: On measuring fairness in queues. Advances in Applied Probability 36(3), 919–936 (2004)
Avi-Itzhak, B., Levy, H., Raz, D.: A resource allocation queueing fairness measure: Properties and bounds. Queueing Systems Theory and Application 56(2), 65–71 (2007)
Bansal, N., Harchol-Balter, M.: Analysis of SRPT scheduling: Investigating unfairness. In: Proceedings of ACM Sigmetrics 2001 Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, pp. 279–290 (2001)
Bender, M., Chakrabarti, S., Muthukrishnan, S.: Flow and stretch metrics for scheduling continuous job streams. In: Proceedings of the 9th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, San Francisco, CA, pp. 270–279 (1998)
Bennet, J.C.R., Zhang, H.: WF2Q: Worst-case fair weighted fair queueing. In: Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 1996, San Francisco, March 1996, pp. 120–128 (1996)
Bonald, T., Proutière, A.: Insensitive bandwidth sharing in data networks. Queueing Systems 44(1), 69–100 (2003)
Cooper, R.B.: Introduction to Queueing Theory, 2nd edn. North-Holland (Elsevier), Amsterdam (1981)
Daigle, J.D.: Queueing Theory for Telecommunications. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1991)
Demers, A., Keshav, S., Shenker, S.: Analysis and simulation of a fair queueing algorithm. Internetworking Research and Experience 1, 3–26 (1990)
Golestani, S.J.: A self-clocked fair queueing scheme for broadband application. In: Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 1994, Toronto, Canada, June 1994, pp. 636–646 (1994)
Greenberg, A.G., Madras, N.: How fair is fair queueing? Journal of the ACM 3(39), 568–598 (1992)
Gross, D., Harris, C.L.: Fundamentals of Queueing Theory. Wiley & Sons, New York (1974)
Hall, R.W.: Queueing Methods for Services and Manufacturing. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1991)
Jaffe, J.M.: Bottleneck flow control. IEEE Transactions on Communications 29(7), 954–962 (1981)
Kelly, F.P.: Charging and rate control for elastic traffic. European Transactions on Telecommunications 8, 33–37 (1997)
Keshav, S.: An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking: ATM Networks, the Internet, and the Telephone Network. Addison Wesley Professional, Reading (1997)
Kingman, J.F.C.: The effect of queue discipline on waiting time variance. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 58, 163–164 (1962)
Kleinrock, L.: Queueing Systems. Theory, vol. 1. Wiley, Chichester (1975)
Kleinrock, L.: Queueing Systems. Computer Applications, vol. 2. Wiley, Chichester (1976)
Larson, R.C.: Perspective on queues: Social justice and the psychology of queueing. Operations Research 35, 895–905 (1987)
Mann, I.: Queue culture: The waiting line as a social system. Am. J. Sociol. 75, 340–354 (1969)
Palm, C.: Methods of judging the annoyance caused by congestion. Tele (English Ed.) 2, 1–20 (1953)
Parekh, A.: A Generalized Processor Sharing Approach to Flow Control in Integrated Services Networks. Ph.D. thesis, MIT (February 1992)
Parekh, A., Gallager, R.G.: A generalized processor sharing approach to flow control in integrated services networks: The single node case. IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking 1, 344–357 (1993)
Parekh, A., Gallager, R.G.: A generalized processor sharing approach to flow control in integrated services networks: The multiple node case. IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking 2, 137–150 (1994)
Rafaeli, A., Barron, G., Haber, K.: The effects of queue structure on attitudes. Journal of Service Research 5(2), 125–139 (2002)
Rafaeli, A., Kedmi, E., Vashdi, D., Barron, G.: Queues and fairness: A multiple study experimental investigation. Tech. rep., Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion. Haifa, Israel (2003) (under review), http://iew3.technion.ac.il/Home/Users/anatr/JAP-Fairness-Submission.pdf
Raz, D., Levy, H., Avi-Itzhak, B.: A resource-allocation queueing fairness measure. In: Proceedings of Sigmetrics 2004/Performance 2004 Joint Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, New York, NY, June 2004, pp. 130–141 (2004); Performance Evaluation Review, 32(1), 130–141
Rexford, J., Greenberg, A., Bonomi, F.: Hardware-efficient fair queueing architectures for high-speed networks. In: Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 1996, March 1996, pp. 638–646 (1996)
Rothkopf, M.H., Rech, P.: Perspectives on queues: Combining queues is not always beneficial. Operations Research 35, 906–909 (1987)
Wang, Y.T., Morris, R.J.T.: Load sharing in distributed systems. IEEE Trans. on Computers C 34(3), 204–217 (1985)
Whitt, W.: The amount of overtaking in a network of queues. Networks 14(3), 411–426 (1984)
Wierman, A., Harchol-Balter, M.: Classifying scheduling policies with respect to unfairness in an M/GI/1. In: Proceedings of ACM Sigmetrics 2003 Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, San Diego, CA, June 2003, pp. 238–249 (2003)
Zhou, Y., Sethu, H.: On the relationship between absolute and relative fairness bounds. IEEE Communication Letters 6(1), 37–39 (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Levy, H., Avi-Itzhak, B., Raz, D. (2011). Principles of Fairness Quantification in Queueing Systems. In: Kouvatsos, D.D. (eds) Network Performance Engineering. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5233. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02742-0_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02742-0_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-02741-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-02742-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)