On-line load balancing

Yossi Azar, Andrei Z. Broder*, Anna R. Karlin

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

62 Scopus citations

Abstract

The setup for our problem consists of n servers that must complete a set of tasks. Each task can be handled only by a subset of the servers, requires a different level of service, and once assigned cannot be reassigned. We make the natural assumption that the level of service is known at arrival time, but that the duration of service is not. The on-line load balancing problem is to assign each task to an appropriate server in such a way that the maximum load on the servers is minimized. In this paper we derive matching upper and lower bounds for the competitive ratio of the on-line greedy algorithm for this problem, namely, [(3n) 2 3/2](1+o(1)), and derive a lower bound, Ω(n 1 2), for any other deterministic or randomized on-line algorithm.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)73-84
Number of pages12
JournalTheoretical Computer Science
Volume130
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Aug 1994

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