Scheduling information dissemination by satellite broadcast

^One of the potential capabilities of the Global Broadcast Service (GBS) is that information providers may engage GBS in dialogues to reserve broadcast resources for application data dissemination. This paper describes one approach for automating this interaction by adapting commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) packages for scheduling computing jobs. These COTS tools implement processor assignment policies and provide job queue management in heterogeneous processing environments. We discuss how to understand the information dissemination problem in terms of services requiring the assignment of processing resources. A broadcast schedule can then be planned by a system that makes job scheduling decisions based on anticipated bandwidth utilization. The quality of service (QoS) parameters associated with each broadcast request provide the prior knowledge about resource requirements (e.g., connectivity, bandwidth, latencies) needed to automatically create a broadcast schedule. An important design feature involves the capability to reschedule future activities based on feedback about the actual performance of jobs in progress. Cooperating scheduling frameworks can manage information distribution services which must schedule access to broadcast services. This approach implements policies and priorities for information management and GBS broadcast management. The result is an automated scheduling mechanism that manages services which disseminate information by satellite broadcast