In portable multimedia systems a number of communicating tasks has to be performed on a set of heterogeneous processors. This should be done in an energy-efficient way. We give the background of the problem and model it as a graph optimization problem, which we call the minimum weight processor assignment problem. We show that our setting generalizes several problems known in literature, including minimum multiway cut, graph k-colorability, and minimum (generalized) vertex covering. We show that the minimum weight processor assignment problem is NP-hard, even when restricted to instances where the (process) graph is a bipartite graph with maximum degree at most 3, or with only two processors, or with arbitrarily small weight differences, or with only two different edge weights. For graphs with maximum degree at most 2 (or in fact the larger class of degree-2-contractible graphs) we give a polynomial time algorithm. Finally we generalize this algorithm into an exact (but not efficien...
Hajo Broersma, Daniël Paulusma, Gerard J. M.