Amortized efficiency of list update and paging rules
Communications of the ACM
Competitive algorithms for server problems
Journal of Algorithms
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Online computation and competitive analysis
Online computation and competitive analysis
A guessing game and randomized online algorithms
STOC '00 Proceedings of the thirty-second annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Dynamic session management for static and mobile users: a competitive on-line algorithmic approach
DIALM '00 Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on Discrete algorithms and methods for mobile computing and communications
On-line analysis of the TCP acknowledgment delay problem
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Theoretical Computer Science
Journal of Algorithms
Nearly optimal strategies for special cases of on-line capital investment
Theoretical Computer Science
Combining request scheduling with web caching
Theoretical Computer Science - Special issue: Online algorithms in memoriam, Steve Seiden
Dynamic TCP Acknowledgment: Penalizing Long Delays
SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics
Optimally competitive list batching
Theoretical Computer Science
On time lookahead algorithms for the online data acknowledgement problem
MFCS'07 Proceedings of the 32nd international conference on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science
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We study an on-line problem that is motivated by service calls management in a remote support center. When a customer calls the remote support center of a software company, a technician opens a service request and assigns it a severity rating. This request is then transferred to the appropriate support engineer (SE) who establishes a connection to the customer's site and uses remote diagnostic capabilities to resolve the problem. We assume that the SE can service at most one customer at time and a request service time is negligible. There is a constant setup cost of creating a new connection to a customer's site and a specific cost per request for delaying its service that depends on the severity of the request. The problem is to decide which customers to serve first so as to minimize the incurred cost. This problem with just two customers is a natural generalization of the TCP acknowledgment problem. For the on-line version of the Remote Server Problem (RSP), we present algorithms for the general case and for a special case of two customers that achieve competitive ratios of exactly 4 and 3, respectively. We also show that no deterministic on-line algorithm can have competitive ratio better than 3. Then we study generalized versions of our model, these are the case of an asymmetric setup cost function and the case of multiple SEs. For the off-line version of the RSP, we derive an optimal algorithm with a polynomial running time for a constant number of customers.