Class treatment in queueing systems: Discrimination and fairness aspects

Customer classification and prioritization are commonly utilized in applications to provide queue preferential service. Their fairness aspects, which are inherent to any preferential system and highly important to customers, have not been fully studied and quantified to date. We use the recently proposed Resource Allocation Queueing Fairness Measure (RAQFM), and a newly introduced metric called class discrimination, which is based on RAQFM, to analyze such systems and derive their relative fairness values as well as the discrimination experienced by the various classes. Specifically, we study two practices, commonly used in public facilities as well as in computer systems: class prioritization and dedication of resources to classes.