On-line load balancing of temporary tasks on identical machines

Abstract

We prove an exact lower bound of 2-1/m on the competitive ratio of any deterministic algorithm for load balancing of temporary tasks on m identical machines. We also show a lower bound of 2-1/m for randomized algorithms for small m and 2-2/m+1 for general m. If in addition, we restrict the sequence to polynomial length, then the lower bound for randomized algorithms becomes 2-O(log log m/log m) for general m.