A Strategyproof Mechanism for Scheduling Divisible Loads in Distributed Systems

An important scheduling problem is the one in which there are no dependencies between tasks and the tasks can be of arbitrary size. This is known as the divisible load scheduling problem and was studied extensively resulting in a cohesive theory called divisible load theory (DLT). In this paper, we augment the existing divisible load theory with incentives. We develop a strategyproof mechanism for scheduling divisible loads in distributed systems assuming a bus type interconnection and a linear cost model for the processors. The mechanism provides incentives to processors such that it is beneficial for them to report their true processing power and process the assigned load using their full processing capacity. We define the strategyproof mechanism and prove its properties. We simulate and study the implementation of the mechanism on systems characterized by different parameters