Truthful Online Scheduling with Commitments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a truthful online scheduling mechanism with commitments for deadline-aware cloud jobs, achieving a constant competitive ratio under slackness assumptions and enabling early job completion guarantees.

Contribution

It presents the first truthful scheduling mechanism with a constant competitive ratio under deadline slackness and incorporates a commitment property for early job outcome determination.

Findings

Mechanism achieves constant competitive ratio with slackness s > 1.

Mechanism can determine job completion and payments before deadlines for large s.

Addresses practical user concerns by providing early job outcome commitments.

Abstract

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.