Priority Round-Robin Scheduling for Very Large Virtual Environments

In virtual environments containing a very large number of objects, the limited amount of available resources often proves to be a bottleneck, causing a competition for those resources – for example network bandwidth, processing power or the rendering pipeline. This leads to a degradation of the system’s performance, as only a small number of elements can be granted the resource required. In this paper we present a generic scheduling algorithm that allows to achieve a graceful degradation; it is output sensitive, minimizes the risk of starvation and enforces priorities based on a freely definable error metric. Hence it can be employed in virtual environments of almost any size, to schedule elements which are competing for a determined resource, because of a bottleneck.