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We study online mechanisms for preemptive scheduling with deadlines, with the goal of maximizing the total value of completed jobs. This problem is fundamental to deadline-aware cloud scheduling, but there are strong lower bounds even for the algorithmic problem without incentive constraints. However, these lower bounds can be circumvented under the natural assumption of deadline slackness, i.e., that there is a guaranteed lower bound s > 1 on the ratio between a job's size and the time window in which it can be executed.In this paper, we construct a truthful scheduling mechanism with a constant competitive ratio, given slackness s > 1. Furthermore, we show that if s is large enough then we can construct a mechanism that also satisfies a commitment property: it can be determined whether or not a job will finish, and the requisite payment if so, well in advance of each job's deadline. This is notable because, in practice, users with strict deadlines may find it unacceptable to discover only very close to their deadline that their job has been rejected.

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The work is motivated by deadlock resolution and resource allocation problems, occurring in distributed server-client architectures. We consider a very general setting which includes, as special cases, distributed bandwidth management in communication networks, as well as variations of classical problems in distributed computing and communication networking such as deadlock resolution and \dining philosophers".In the current paper, we exhibit rst local solutions with globally-optimum performance guarantees. An application of our method is distributed bandwidth management in communication networks. In this setting, deadlock resolution (and maximum fractional independent set) corresponds to admission control maximizing network throughput. Job scheduling (and minimum fractional coloring) corresponds to route selection that minimizes load.

We investigate the influence of different algorithmic choices on the approximation ratio in selfish scheduling. Our goal is to design local policies that minimize the inefficiency of resulting equilibria. In particular, we design optimal coordination mechanisms for unrelated machine scheduling, and improve the known approximation ratio from Θ(m) to Θ(log m), where m is the number of machines. A local policy for each machine orders the set of jobs assigned to it only based on parameters of those jobs. A strongly local policy only uses the processing time of jobs on the same machine. We prove that the approximation ratio of any set of strongly local ordering policies in equilibria is at least Ω(m). In particular, it implies that the approximation ratio of a greedy shortest-first algorithm for machine scheduling is at least Ω(m). This closes the gap between the known lower and upper bounds for this problem and answers an open question raised by Ibarra and Kim (1977) [Ibarra OH, Kim CE (1977) Heuristic algorithms for scheduling independent tasks on nonidentical processors. J. ACM 24(2):280–289.], and Davis and Jaffe (1981) [Davis E, Jaffe JM (1981) Algorithms for scheduling tasks on unrelated processors. J. ACM 28(4):721–736.]. We then design a local ordering policy with the approximation ratio of Θ(log m) in equilibria, and prove that this policy is optimal among all local ordering policies. This policy orders the jobs in the nondecreasing order of their inefficiency, i.e., the ratio between the processing time on that machine over the minimum processing time. Finally, we show that best responses of players for the inefficiency-based policy may not converge to a pure Nash equilibrium, and present a Θ(log2 m) policy for which we can prove fast convergence of best responses to pure Nash equilibria.

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In this paper we present a strategy to route unknown duration virtual circuits in a high-speed communication network. Previous work on virtual circuit routing concentrated on the case where the call duration is known in advance. We show that by allowing O(log n) reroutes per call, we can achieve O(log n) competitive ratio with respect to the maximum load (congestion) for the unknown duration case, where n is the number of nodes in the network. This is in contrast to the 0( 4 -n) lower bound on the competitive ratio for this case if no rerouting is allowed (Azar et al., 1992, Proc. 33rd IEEE Annual Symposium of Foundations of Computer Science, pp. 218 225). Our routing algorithm can be also applied in the context of machine load balancing of