Fairness in processor scheduling in time sharing systems

Abstract

Loosely, fairness is the assurance of granting each request, from a set of requests, within a predetermined bounded time even though the request scheduling primitives are unfair or random. The fairness property has been studied, in solutions to the mutual exclusion problem, from theoretical point of view. Many fair solutions to the mutual exclusion problem have been proposed in recent years. This paper presents one illustration to show how the concepts of fairness could be incorporated in processor scheduling in time sharing systems. First, it looks at some shortcomings associated with the round robin scheduler used in the time sharing systems, and then presents a fair version of the round robin scheduler.