METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CALL DISTRIBUTION AND OVERRIDE WITH PRIORITY RECOGNITION AND FAIRNESS TIMING ROUTINES

A method for promoting fairness in a communication center in response to requests for destination numbers (DNs) from network-level routers has steps of determining latency for requests from individual ones of the network-level routers, receiving a request from a first router for which latency is determined, assigning a fairness wait time to the request, the time determined as an inverse function of latency, and answering the request according to rules in effect only after the wait time has expired. In some cases requests arrive with priority, and priority is used a swell as latency in determining wait time. In other cases a second fairness time is imposed, after which a fairness algorithm is called to award a DN according to statistical history and cal priority. The system is useful for communication centers for connection-oriented telephone systems, Internet protocol systems, and for all sorts of digital messaging and mail systems.