Batch scheduled admission control for computer and network systems

Abstract

An increasing number of business transactions, mission-critical operations and many other activities rely on the services of computer and network systems, and the dependability of those services. However, many computer and network systems do not currently provide adequate service dependability. Such systems place no admission control on service requests (jobs), leading to variability and thus unpredictability in job waiting times which have a negative impact on service dependability. This paper presents a Batch Scheduled Admission Control (BSAC) method to help provide predictability in job waiting time for high priority jobs. With this method, we change the dynamic job arriving problem into a static problem which allows the introduction of job scheduling techniques that require a static set of jobs to operate on for stabilizing their waiting time. We illustrate how our method can be employed through examples and experiments that compare the performance of our method with that of no admission control. The results under our test cases show that our method improves the variance of job waiting times, and in some cases with little sacrifice to the mean of job waiting times.