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An Empirical Study of Online Packet Scheduling Algorithms

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Experimental Algorithms (SEA 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9685))

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Abstract

This work studies online scheduling algorithms for buffer management, develops new algorithms, and analyzes their performances. Packets arrive at a release time r, with a non-negative weight w and an integer deadline d. At each time step, at most one packet is scheduled. The modified greedy (MG) algorithm is 1.618-competitive for the objective of maximizing the sum of weights of packets sent, assuming agreeable deadlines. We analyze the empirical behavior of MG in a situation with arbitrary deadlines and demonstrate that it is at a disadvantage when frequently preferring maximum weight packets over early deadline ones. We develop the MLP algorithm, which remedies this problem whilst mimicking the behavior of the offline algorithm. Our comparative analysis shows that, although the competitive ratio of MLP is not as good as that of MG, it performs better in practice. We validate this by simulating the behavior of both algorithms under a spectrum of parameter settings. Finally, we propose the design of three additional algorithms, which may help in improving performance in practice.

N. Sakr—Supported in part by NSF grant CCF-1421161.

C. Stein—Supported in part by NSF grant CCF-1421161.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Shokri Z. Selim and Javid Ali.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10027, USA

    Nourhan Sakr & Cliff Stein

Authors
  1. Nourhan Sakr
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  2. Cliff Stein
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Correspondence to Nourhan Sakr .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Amazon.com, Inc., Palo Alto, California, USA

    Andrew V. Goldberg

  2. Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Alexander S. Kulikov

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Sakr, N., Stein, C. (2016). An Empirical Study of Online Packet Scheduling Algorithms. In: Goldberg, A., Kulikov, A. (eds) Experimental Algorithms. SEA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9685. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38851-9_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38851-9_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-38850-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-38851-9

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