Dynamic process scheduling in linux for mobile computing

Abstract

Nowadays, the mobile computing is one of biggest paradigms in the communication world. Since, however, mobile computers have limited resources, not many jobs can be processed simultaneously. An overhead of context switching among the processes is also a problem caused by such resource limitations. In this paper, we propose a dynamic process scheduling scheme for mobile computers, which adjusts the size of time slice in the Linux process scheduler depending on the number of processes, in order to reduce the number of context switching. In order to evaluate the performance of proposed scheduling scheme, we makes a test program, which forks some dummy processes and measures a total execution time of each process. Through the experiment, we can obtain a result that the proposed scheduling scheme significantly improves turnaround time compared to the scheduling scheme adopted in Linux. In addition, we can verify the reducing rate of context switching time by a benchmarking tool called lmbench.