Longest Wait First for Broadcast Scheduling

Abstract

We consider online algorithms for broadcast scheduling. In the pull-based broadcast model there are $n$ unit-sized pages of information at a server and requests arrive online for pages. When the server transmits a page $p$, all outstanding requests for that page are satisfied. The longest-wait-first} (LWF) algorithm is a natural algorithm that has been shown to have good empirical performance. In this paper we make two main contributions to the analysis of LWF and broadcast scheduling. \begin{itemize} \item We give an intuitive and easy to understand analysis of LWF which shows that it is $O(1/\eps^2)$-competitive for average flow-time with $(4+\eps)$ speed. Using a more involved analysis, we show that LWF is $O(1/\eps^3)$-competitive for average flow-time with $(3.4+\epsilon)$ speed. \item We show that a natural extension of LWF is O(1)-speed O(1)-competitive for more general objective functions such as average delay-factor and $L_k$ norms of delay-factor (for fixed $k$). \end{itemize}