Immediate Notification

When admission control is used, an online scheduler chooses whether or not to complete each individual job successfully by its deadline. An important consideration is at what point in time the scheduler determines if a job request will be satisfied, and thus at what point the scheduler is able to provide notification to the job owner as to the fate of the request. In the loosest model, often seen in real-time systems, such a decision can be deferred up until the job’s deadline passes. In the strictest model, more suitable for customer-based applications, a scheduler would be required to give notification at the instant that a job request arrives. Unfortunately there seems to be little existing research which explicitly studies the effect of the notification model on the performance guarantees of a scheduler. We undertake such a study by re-examining a problem from the literature. Specifically, we study the effect of the notification model on the non-preemptive scheduling of a single resource in order to maximize utilization. At first glance, it appears severely more restrictive to compare a scheduler required to give immediate notification to one which need not give any notification. Yet we are able to present alternate algorithms which provide immediate notification, while matching most of the performance guarantees which are possible by schedulers which provide no such notification. In only one case are we able to give evidence that providing immediate notification may be more difficult.