Thek-server dual and loose competitiveness for paging

Abstract

Weighted caching is a generalization ofpaging in which the cost to evict an item depends on the item. We study both of these problems as restrictions of the well-knownk-server problem, which involves moving servers in a graph in response to requests so as to minimize the distance traveled.

We give a deterministic on-line strategy for weighted caching that, on any sequence of requests, given a cache holdingk items, incurs a cost within a factor ofk/(k−h+1) of the minimum cost possible given a cache holdingh items. The strategy generalizes “least recently used,” one of the best paging strategies in practice. The analysis is a primal-dual analysis, the first for an on-line problem, exploiting the linear programming structure of thek-server problem.

We introduceloose competitiveness, motivated by Sleator and Tarjan's complaint [ST] that the standard competitive ratios for paging strategies are too high. Ak-server strategy isloosely c(k)-competitive if, for any sequence, foralmost all k, the cost incurred by the strategy withk serverseither is no more thanc(k) times the minimum costor is insignificant.

We show that certain paging strategies (including “least recently used,” and “first in first out”) that arek-competitive in the standard model are looselyc(k)-competitive providedc(k)/Ink→∞ and bothk/c(k) andc(k) are nondecreasing. We show that the marking algorithm, a randomized paging strategy that is Θ(Ink)-competitive in the standard model, is looselyc(k)-competitive providedk−2 In Ink→∞ and both 2 Ink−c(k) andc(k) are nondecreasing.