Fairness and Scheduling in Single Server Queues

Traditionally, the study of scheduling policies has focused on performance metrics such as response time, queue length, and throughput. However, the more vague notion of ‘fairness’ is often equally or more important than these traditional performance metrics. But, the concept of fairness is difficult to define and so it has been studied only sporadically. This has changed over the last decade and a growing literature providing an analytic framework for studying fairness has emerged. This article surveys recent developments, which include a rich variety of fairness metrics as well as a growing understanding of the fairness of common scheduling policies.