Admission control to minimize rejections and online set cover with repetitions

We study the admission control problem in general networks. Communication requests arrive over time, and the online algorithm accepts or rejects each request while maintaining the capacity limitations of the network. The admission control problem has been usually analyzed as a benefit problem, where the goal is to devise an online algorithm that accepts the maximum number of requests possible. The problem with this objective function is that even algorithms with optimal competitive ratios may reject almost all of the requests, when it would have been possible to reject only a few. This could be inappropriate for settings in which rejections are intended to be rare events. In this paper, we consider preemptive online algorithms whose goal is to minimize the number of rejected requests. Each request arrives together with the path it should be routed on. We show an O(log2 (mc))-competitive randomized algorithm for the weighted case, where m is the number of edges in the graph and c is t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SPAA
• Authors: Noga Alon, Yossi Azar, Shai Gutner
• Keywords: Admission Control Problem, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Online Algorithms, Randomized Algorithm, SPAA 2005