How fair is queue prioritization?

Customer classification and prioritization are commonly used in many applications to provide queue preferential service. Their influence on queuing systems has been thoroughly studied from the delay distribution perspective. However, the fairness aspects, which are inherent to any preferential system and highly important to customers, have hardly been studied and not been quantified to date. In this work we use the Resource Allocation Queueing Fairness Measure (RAQFM) to analyze such systems and derive their relative fairness values. We also analyze the effect multiple servers have on fairness, showing that multiple servers increase the fairness of the system.¹