Periodic Scheduling and Packing Problems

TL;DR

This paper explores periodic scheduling and packing problems motivated by autonomous car data transmission, generalizing existing results to harmonic periods and developing an approximation algorithm based on classical bin packing techniques.

Contribution

It extends the equivalence between periodic scheduling and 2D bin packing to harmonic periods and introduces an approximation algorithm using classical results.

Findings

Generalized periodic scheduling to harmonic periods.

Established an approximation algorithm for the problem.

Connected scheduling problems with classical bin packing results.

Abstract

This paper is motivated by periodic data transmission in autonomous cars. We considered periodic tasks (with different periods) on one or several machines. After reviewing the literature on the subject, we managed to generalize a result of Lukasiewicz et al. (i.e., the equivalence of periodic scheduling with the power of two periods and special 2D bin packing) to harmonic periods. Furthermore, we use quite old results by Coffman, Garey, and Johnson to get an approximation algorithm.