Online service with delay

Yossi Azar, Arun Ganesh, Rong Ge, Debmalya Panigrahi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

31 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the online service with delay problem. In this problem, there are n points in a metric space that issue service requests over time, and a server that serves these requests. The goal is to minimize the sum of distance traveled by the server and the total delay (or a penalty function thereof) in serving the requests. This problem models the fundamental tradeoff between batching requests to improve locality and reducing delay to improve response time, that has many applications in operations management, operating systems, logistics, supply chain management, and scheduling. Our main result is to show a poly-logarithmic competitive ratio for the online service with delay problem. This result is obtained by an algorithm that we call the preemptive service algorithm. The salient feature of this algorithm is a process called preemptive service, which uses a novel combination of (recursive) time forwarding and spatial exploration on a metric space. We also generalize our results to k > 1 servers, and obtain stronger results for special metrics such as uniform and star metrics that correspond to (weighted) paging problems.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSTOC 2017 - Proceedings of the 49th Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing
EditorsPierre McKenzie, Valerie King, Hamed Hatami
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages551-563
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450345286
DOIs
StatePublished - 19 Jun 2017
Event49th Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 2017 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: 19 Jun 201723 Jun 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing
VolumePart F128415
ISSN (Print)0737-8017

Conference

Conference49th Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 2017
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period19/06/1723/06/17

Keywords

  • Competitive ratio
  • K-server
  • Online algorithms
  • Paging
  • Weighted paging

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