Job fairness in non-preemptive job scheduling

Abstract

Job scheduling has been a much studied topic over the years. While past research has studied the effect of various scheduling policies using metrics such as turnaround time, slowdown, utilization etc., there has been little research on how fair a nonpreemptive scheduling policy is. We propose an approach to assessing fairness in nonpreemptive job scheduling. Our basic model of fairness is that no later arriving job should delay an earlier arriving job. We quantitatively assess the fairness of several job scheduling strategies and propose a new strategy that seeks to improve fairness.