Generalized Reordering Buffer Management

An instance of the generalized reordering buffer management problem consists of a service station that has k servers, each configured with a color, and a buffer of size b. The station needs to serve an online stream of colored items. Whenever an item arrives, it is stored in the buffer. At any point in time, a currently pending item can be served by switching a server to its color. The objective is to serve all items in a way that minimizes the number of servers color switches. This problem generalizes two well-studied online problems: the paging problem, which is the special case when b=1, and the reordering buffer problem, which is the special case when k=1. In this paper, we develop a randomized online algorithm that obtains a competitive ratio of O(sqrt(b).ln(k)). Note that this result beats the easy deterministic lower bound of k whenever b < k^(2-e). We complement our randomized approach by presenting a deterministic algorithm that attains a competitive ratio of O(min{k^2.ln(b),k.b}). We further demonstrate that if our deterministic algorithm can employ k/(1-d) servers where d is in (0,1), then it achieves a competitive ratio of O(min{ln(b/d^2),b/d}) against an optimal offline adversary that employs k servers