Beyond Competitive Analysis

  • Authors:
  • Elias Koutsoupias;Christos H. Papadimitriou

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • SIAM Journal on Computing
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

The competitive analysis of online algorithms has been criticized as being too crude and unrealistic. We propose refinements of competitive analysis in two directions: The first restricts the power of the adversary by allowing only certain input distributions, while the other allows for comparisons between information regimes for online decision-making. We illustrate the first with an application to the paging problem; as a byproduct we characterize completely the work functions of this important special case of the k-server problem. We use the second refinement to explore the power of lookahead in server and task systems.