Article ID: | iaor2007909 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 47 |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 225 |
End Page Number: | 236 |
Publication Date: | Jul 2006 |
Journal: | Networks |
Authors: | Srinivasan Aravind, Khuller Samir, Gandhi Rajiv, Wang Nan |
We study two packing problems that arise in the area of dissemination-based information systems; a second theme is the study of distributed approximation algorithms. The problems considered have the property that the space occupied by a collection of objects together could be significantly less than the sum of the sizes of the individual objects. In the Channel Allocation Problem, there are requests that are subsets of topics. There are a fixed number of channels that can carry an arbitrary number of topics. All the topics of each request must be broadcast on some channel. The load on any channel is the number of topics that are broadcast on that channel; the objective is to minimize the maximum load on any channel. We present approximation algorithms for this problem, and also show that the problem is MAX-SNP hard. The second problem is the Edge Partitioning Problem addressed by Goldschmidt, Hochbaum, Levin, and Olinick. Each channel here can deliver topics for at most