Article ID: | iaor20053105 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 9 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 157 |
End Page Number: | 165 |
Publication Date: | Mar 2005 |
Journal: | Journal of Combinatorial Optimization |
Authors: | Lam Tak-Wah, Ngan Tusen-Wan Johnny, To Kar-Keung |
This paper is concerned with online algorithms for scheduling jobs with deadlines on a single processor. It has been known for long that unless the system is underloaded, no online scheduling algorithm can be 1-competitive, i.e., matching the performance of the optimal offline algorithm. Nevertheless, recent work has revealed that some online algorithms using a moderately faster processor (or extra processors) can guarante very competitive performance, or even be 1-competitive. This paper takes a further step to investigate online scheduling algorithms with an even higher performance guarantee (i.e., better than 1-competitive algorithms) and in particular, presents an extra-resource analysis of the earliest-deadline-first strategy (EDF) with respect to such a higher performance guarantee.