Online Metric Matching with Unknown i.i.d. Arrivals

Abstract

We study online metric matching with $n$ servers and $n$ requests drawn independently from an unknown distribution. Each request must be matched immediately and irrevocably to an unused server, and the algorithm receives no samples before the process starts. We give a randomized algorithm that is $O((\log\log\log n)^2)$-competitive on arbitrary metric spaces and $O(1)$-competitive on tree metrics. These guarantees match the corresponding bounds for known i.i.d. request distributions in [GGPW19] up to constant factors. More generally, our competitive ratio is $O(α(n))$ whenever the Fair-Bias algorithm introduced in that work has competitive ratio $α(n)$ for known i.i.d. arrivals on the same class of metrics. Consequently, proving that Fair-Bias is constant-competitive on general metrics would also yield a constant-competitive algorithm for unknown i.i.d. arrivals.