Group Meeting - Process Priority Boosting

Today's group meeting was about process priority boosting. That is, finding ways to alter the kernel to boost network application's priority when in range of a hot-spot. This will ensure that network apps can finish synchronizing with the hot-spot before they go out of range.

The main idea was to listen for socket calls and raise the priority of processes that make them. This is very beneficial in Linux 2.4 kernel, but only marginally useful in 2.6 kernel. This is because 2.6 kernel does a better job or raising the priority of interactive applications, and because a network app will typically block before the end of its time-slice, it is classified as interactive.

There were a couple of schemes for raising priority. Static gives a constant boost. Decreasing gives a large boost, then linearly takes it away to a minimum threshold. Increasing gives a linearly increasing priority to a maximum threshold. The axis against which priority is boosted can be based on time, packets sent, socket calls, or data sent.