Two-level processor-sharing scheduling disciplines: mean delay analysis

Inspired by several recent papers that focus on scheduling disciplines for network flows, we present a mean delay analysis of Multilevel Processor Sharing (MLPS) scheduling disciplines in the context of M/G/1 queues. Such disciplines have been proposed to model the effect of the differentiation between short and long TCP flows in the Internet. Under MLPS, jobs are classified into classes depending on their attained service. We consider scheduling disciplines where jobs within the same class are served either with Processor Sharing (PS) or Foreground Background (FB) policy, and the class that contains jobs with the smallest attained service is served first. It is known that the FB policy minimizes (maximizes) the mean delay when the hazard rate of the job size distribution is decreasing (increasing). Our analysis, based on pathwise and meanwise arguments of the unfinished truncated work, shows that Two-Level Processor Sharing (TLPS) disciplines, e.g., FB+PS and PS+PS, are better than PS scheduling when the hazard rate of the job size distribution is decreasing. If the hazard rate is increasing and bounded, we show that PS outperforms PS+PS and FB+PS. We further extend our analysis to study local optimality within a level of an MLPS scheduling discipline.