Real-time guarantees in flexible advance reservations

This paper deals with the problem of scheduling workflow applications with Quality of Service (QoS) constraints, comprising real-time and interactivity constraints, over a service-oriented Grid network. A novel approach is proposed, in which high-level Advance Reservations, supporting flexible start and end time, are combined with low-level soft real-time scheduling,allowing for the concurrent deployment of multiple services on the same host while fulfilling their QoS requirements. By undertaking a stochastic approach, in which a-priori knowledge is leveraged about the probability of activation of the application workflows within the reserved time-frame, the proposed methodology allows for the achievement of various trade-offs between the need for respecting QoS constraints (user perspective) and the need for having good resource saturation levels (service provider perspective)