Dynamic Policies for Service Provisioning Systems
I. Mitrani (University of Newcastle, UK), M. Mazzucco (University of Newcastle, UK), M. Fisher (British Telecom) and P. McKee (British Telecom)
A system using a number of servers to offer different types of services to paying customers is examined. A customer is charged for the execution of a stream of jobs; the number of jobs in the stream and the rate of their submission is specified. On the other hand, the provider promises a certain quality of service, measured by the average waiting time of the jobs in the stream. A penalty is paid if the agreed QoS requirement is not met. The objective is to maximize the total average revenue per unit time. Dynamic policies for making server allocation and stream admission decisions are introduced and evaluated. The results of several experiments with a real system are described.