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.
Queues serve as a major building block in computer networks and are used to schedule and prioritize tasks both at the network level and at the application level. With the advances of the Internet more and more services move from the “physical world” into the “network controlled” world and require the use of computer and communications controlled queues. Examples include file servers used for the download of music, video, games and other applications, and call-centers.
After many years of neglect, the positive implications of government spending for business cycle dynamics are again at the center of research. In part, there is a pressing real world motivation behind this interest. All over the developed world, fiscal spending increased rapidly between 2007 and 2009 and, in the United States, the ratio of government expenditures to GDP increased by 4.4%, the largest two year increase since 1950-52. New theoretical research on the topic has characterized the circumstances under which an increase in government consumption can lead to a significant increase in output in neoclassical and new Keynesian DSGE models. Recent empirical studies have used a variety of econometric techniques and data sources to identify the impact of changes in government purchases on output and employment.
The National Minimum Wage (NMW) that was introduced in April 1999 is sometimes paraded as evidence of the Blair government’s commitment to reversing the rise in inequality that was characteristic of the 1980s (mostly) and the 1990s (a little). But, how much of an effect has it really had? One would expect the impact to depend on:
And, trivially, the measure of wage inequality that one is looking at. In other work (Dickens and Manning, 2002, 2003) we have used data from the Labour Force Survey to investigate some of these issues. The conclusion from that research was that the NMW had been set at a level much lower than originally envisaged (see Low Pay Commission, 1998; Metcalf, 1999), affecting no more than 6% of workers and quite possibly less. And, that there seemed to be little in the way of spill-overs further up the wage distribution.
