A Security-Oriented Task Scheduler for Heterogeneous Distributed Systems

High quality of security is increasingly critical for applications running on heterogeneous distributed systems, where processors operate at different speeds and communication channels have different bandwidths. Although there are a few scheduling algorithms in the literature for heterogeneous distributed systems, they generally do not take into account of security requirements of applications. In this paper, we propose a novel heuristic scheduling algorithm, or SATS, which is conducive to improving security of heterogeneous distributed systems. First, we formalize a concept of security heterogeneity for our scheduling model in the context of distributed systems. Next, we devise the SATS algorithm aiming at scheduling tasks to maximize the probability that all tasks are executed without any risk of being attacked. Empirical results demonstrate that with respect to security and performance, the proposed scheduling algorithm outperforms existing approaches for heterogeneous distributed systems.