Classifying scheduling policies with respect to unfairness in an M/GI/1

Abstract

It is common to evaluate scheduling policies based on their mean response times. Another important, but sometimes opposing, performance metric is a scheduling policy's fairness. For example, a policy that biases towards small job sizes so as to minimize mean response time may end up being unfair to large job sizes. In this paper we define three types of unfairness and demonstrate large classes of scheduling policies that fall into each type. We end with a discussion on which jobs are the ones being treated unfairly.