Optimal Scheduling of Two Communication Flows on Multiple Disjoint Packet-Type Aware Paths

Communication flows in distributed systems often present a poor performance, because they are unaware of each other and end up competing for the same bottleneck resources. A solution to this problem consists of scheduling the communication flows in order to optimize some performance metric. In this paper we study the scheduling of two communication flows over multiple disjoint paths, such that the maximum completion time (makespan) is minimized. Each flow is composed of a large number of identical packets of the same type. The paths are aware of the packet types and have different transmission times for each type. We consider the objectives of minimizing the makespan and the weighted sum of completion times. We also consider some error-correcting issues, as well as the possibility of dropping the packet ordering constraints.