Effect of queue discipline on the performance of a queueing system

Abstract

The effect of three queue discipline namely first in, first out (FIFO), last in first out (LIFO) and service in random order (SIRO) on some measures of performance of a single sever queue are examined. The measures of performance are average waiting time and queuing time. The comparison of the systems were carried out by writing an appropriate program in BASIC to simulate the queue discipline. This is due to the versatile nature of simulation and the fact that it is extremely difficult to obtain numerical results mathematically for the single server queue when the queue discipline is not FIFO and the arrival process is non-stationary. The approach adopted is to generate arrival time and service times for n customers through a single sever queuing system under each queue discipline. The measures of performance were calculated for each system using appropriate expressions. The result show that the average queuing time and average waiting time are higher when the queue discipline is LIFO, whereas the total idle time for all the systems were found to be same in most cases.

Journal of the Nigerian Association of Mathematical Physics Vol. 10 2006: pp. 453-456