Title
Call routing to distributed queues: Is FIFO really better than MED?
Abstract
New services providing automatic call distribution in the network have been one of the most hotly contested areas in the USA telecommunications arena in recent years. This has been fueled by increasing demand from large corporations for intelligent network routing that will keep their geographically distributed telemarketing/service centers operating with maximum efficiency. This paper compares two basic strategies for a network call distributor: a centralized FIFO queue and a distributed queueing strategy called Minimum¿Expected¿Delay (MED). According to MED, a central controller routes each arrival to the node that minimizes its expected delay (waiting time). Our main result qualifies the conventional wisdom that perceives FIFO as optimal. We show that the waiting time under FIFO is not stochastically smaller than that under MED. Furthermore, we prove that the waiting time distribution functions intersect at a single point. Numerical experiments suggest that, for certain performance criteria and over a range of parameters of interest, MED can actually outperform FIFO.
Year
DOI
Venue
1997
10.1023/A:1019132630984
Telecommunication Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Service Time,Wait Time Distribution,Delay Distribution,Erlangian Distribution,Trunk Group
Control theory,FIFO (computing and electronics),Computer science,Queue,Computer network,Real-time computing,Conventional wisdom,Queueing theory,Intelligent Network,Maximum efficiency,Call routing
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
7
1-3
1572-9451
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
1.39
2
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yaakov Kogan111821.46
Yonatan Levy2263.63
Rodolfo A. Milito3137670.71