The impact of the service discipline on delay asymptotics

This paper surveys the M/G/l queue with regularly varying service requirement distribution. It studies the effect of the service discipline on the tail behavior of the waiting-time and/or sojourn-time distribution, demonstrating that different disciplines lead to quite different tail behavior. The orientation of the paper is methodological: We outline four different methods for determining tail behavior, illustrating them for service disciplines like FCFS, Processor Sharing and LCFS. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.