P. D. MacKenzie
Abstract
Consider an on-line scheduling problem in which a set of abstract processes are competing for the use of a number of resources. Further assume that it is either prohibitively expensive or impossible for any two of the processes to directly communicate with one another. If several processes simultaneously attempt to allocate a particular resource (as may be expected to occur, since the processes cannot easily coordinate their allocations), then none succeed. In such a framework, it is a challenge to design efficient contention resolution protocols.
Two recently-proposed approaches to the problem of PRAM emulation give rise to scheduling problems of the above kind. In one approach, the resources (in this case, the shared memory cells) are duplicated and distributed randomly. We analyze a simple and efficient deterministic algorithm for accessing some subset of the duplicated resources. In the other approach, we analyze how quickly we can access the given (nonduplicated) resource using a simple randomized strategy. We obtain precise bounds on the performance of both strategies. We anticipate that our results with find other applications.
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Index Terms
- On contention resolution protocols and associated probabilistic phenomena
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Reviews
Ralph Walter Wilkerson
The authors consider an online scheduling problem in which a collection of processes are competing for the use of a number of resources and it is very expensive or impossible for any two of these processes to communicate with each other directly. Recent work in PRAM emulation gives rise to such problems. The authors analyze two approaches to this problem. One involves duplicating and randomly distributing resources (specifically, shared memory cells), and the other involves accessing a nonduplicated resource using a randomized strategy. A significant portion of this paper centers on deriving precise performance bounds on the algorithms used for these problems.
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