A Model and Heuristics for Scheduling Data Traffic at the Application Level in a Distributed Computing Environment

The research explored here examines the ability of users of a distributed communication system to request information from diverse sources (both in terms of locality and data type) and receive this information before the users’ deadlines expire. A model has been developed and studied for the case when the network is oversubscribed and not all requests in the system can be satisfied. This model is based upon systems that are in use or are planned for development. The heuristic presented for scheduling data traffic does not have explicit control of the network; the heuristic works with a network manager to configure and set up information channels that allow users to receive information. The goal is to create a near-optimal set of information channels that will satisfy the users’ requests. Four components are used to create a value function that is used to order the importance of the information channels for presentation to the network manager. In addition, two different weightings for the relative importance of different priority levels are considered. Simulation studies of the heuristic developed show that they perform well compared to upper and lower bounds derived. These results can be used to construct techniques that can be deployed in actual military systems. Furthermore, the model and heuristic studied here can be applied to other domains, such as business applications that utilize the internet to obtain critical information.