Non-preemptive scheduling to maximize the minimum global inter-completion time

Temporal load-balancing—“spreading out” the executions of tasks over time—is desirable in many applications. A form of temporal load-balancing is discussed, scheduling to maximize minimum minimum global inter-completion time (MGICT-scheduling). It is shown that MGICT-scheduling is, in general, NP-hard. A number of restricted classes of task systems are identified, which can be efficiently MGICT-scheduled. The technique is applied to a Defense Network System. Simulation results indicate that the proposed strategy achieves higher communication performance in multiprocessor systems. Specifically, our strategy significantly reduces average message delay and percentage of delayed messages.