Performance of scheduling algorithms for channel reservation

The performance of scheduling algorithms for a reservation system is investigated. In this system, a user request is characterised by its start time, resource requirement and holding time. Of interest are scheduling algorithms to handle user requests in a loss system where resource requirements may vary. A Markov decision process formulation is used to obtain the optimal scheduling decisions. Two special cases are considered in depth; they correspond to optimal algorithms that minimise the blocking probability and maximise the channel utilisation, respectively. Analytic results are also obtained for the blocking probability and channel utilisation for an arbitrary scheduling algorithm. Using these results, the performance of first come, first served (FCFS) and the two optimal algorithms is compared. We also prove that FCFS is optimal for maximising channel utilisation when the resource requirement follows a uniform distribution