How Fair is Fair Queueing?

Fair Queueing is a novel queueing discipline with important applications to data networks and to systems where the cost of preempting jobs from service is relatively high. The discipline controls a single server shared by N job arrival streams with each stream allotted a separate queue. After every job completion the server is assigned to serve, without possibility of interruption, the job at the head of one of the queues (as soon as at least one job appears in the system).