Fairness in processor scheduling in time sharing systems

Loosely, fairness is the assurance of granting each request from a set of requests within a predetermined bounded time, even though the request scheduling primitives are unfair or random. The fairness property has been studied, in olutions to the mutual exclusion problem, from a theoretical point of view. Many fair solutions to the mutual exclusion roblem have been proposed in recent years. The authors present one illustration to show how the concepts of fairness could be incorporated in processor scheduling in time sharing stems. They look at some shortcomings associated with the round robin scheduler used in the time sharing systems and resent a fair version of the round robin schedule