English

Real Time Proportional Throughput Maximization: How much advance notice should you give your scheduler?

Data Structures and Algorithms 2025-11-25 v2

Abstract

We will be exploring a generalization of real time scheduling problem sometimes called the real time throughput maximization problem. Our input is a sequence of jobs specified by their release time, deadline and processing time. We assume that jobs are announced before or at their release time. At each time step, the algorithm must decide whether to schedule a job based on the information so far. The goal is to maximize the value of the sum of the processing times of jobs that finish before their deadline, this is often called real time throughput with proportional weights. We extend this problem by defining a notion of tt-advance-notice, a measure of how far in advance each job is announced relative to their processing time. We show that there exists a t2t+1\frac{t}{2t+1}-competitive algorithm when all jobs have tt-advance-notice for t[0,1]t\in [0,1], this gives us a competitive ratio of 13\frac{1}{3} when tt is greater than or equal to 11. We also show that this ratio is optimal for all algorithms with tt-advance-notice and that the upper bound of t2t+1\frac{t}{2t+1}-competitiveness holds for all tt, in particular that regardless of how much advance-notice is given, no algorithm can reach 12\frac{1}{2}-competitiveness.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.16023,
  title  = {Real Time Proportional Throughput Maximization: How much advance notice should you give your scheduler?},
  author = {Nadim A. Mottu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.16023},
  year   = {2025}
}