Asymptotically Optimal Online Page Migration on Three Points

This paper addresses the page migration problem: given online requests from nodes on a network for accessing a page stored in a node, output online migrations of the page. Serving a request costs the distance between the request and the page, and migrating the page costs the migration distance multiplied by the page size D≥1. The objective is to minimize the total sum of service costs and migration costs. Black and Sleator conjectured that there exists a 3-competitive deterministic algorithm for every graph. Although the conjecture was disproved for the case D=1, whether or not an asymptotically (with respect to D) 3-competitive deterministic algorithm exists for every graph is still open. In fact, we did not know if there exists a 3-competitive deterministic algorithm for an extreme case of three nodes with D≥2. As the first step toward an asymptotic version of the Black and Sleator conjecture, we present 3- and (3+1/D)-competitive algorithms on three nodes with D=2 and D≥3, respectively, and a lower bound of 3+Ω(1/D) that is greater than 3 for every D≥3. In addition to the results on three nodes, we also derive ρ-competitiveness on complete graphs with edge-weights between 1 and 2-2/ρ for any ρ≥3, extending the previous 3-competitive algorithm on uniform networks. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York