Non-preemptive real-time scheduling of multimedia tasks

Motivated by the special characteristics of multimedia tasks, we consider non-preemptive scheduling of tasks where there exists no (or very limited) information concerning the tasks before they are released. We present impossibility results and analyze algorithms for non-preemptive scheduling in single processor and multiprocessor systems. To evaluate our algorithm we assume that system obtains a value that is proportional to the processing time of the task whenever a task is completed by its deadline. Competitive analysis is used, where the goal is to keep the total value obtained by an on-line algorithm bounded by a function of the total value obtained by an off-line algorithm. In particular, one set of our results considers the competitive ratio of scheduling algorithm when the length of the tasks is not greater than C-max (and not smaller than C-min). We show that the performance of a scheduling algorithm is improved dramatically when the release time of the tasks is O(C-max) prior to their deadline; achieving a competitive ratio that is close to one.