Generalized processor sharing

Generalized processor sharing (GPS) is an ideal scheduling algorithm for process schedulers and network schedulers. It is related to the fair-queuing principle which groups packets into classes and shares the service capacity between them. GPS shares this capacity according to some fixed weights.

In process scheduling, GPS is "an idealized scheduling algorithm that achieves perfect fairness. All practical schedulers approximate GPS and use it as a reference to measure fairness."

Generalized processor sharing assumes that traffic is fluid (infinitesimal packet sizes), and can be arbitrarily split. There are several service disciplines which track the performance of GPS quite closely such as weighted fair queuing (WFQ), also known as packet-by-packet generalized processor sharing (PGPS).