Almost tight bounds for reordering buffer management

We give almost tight bounds for the online reordering buffer management problem on the uniform metric. Specifically, we present the first non-trivial lower bounds for this problem by showing that deterministic online algorithms have a competitive ratio of at least Ω(√{log k/log log k}) and randomized online algorithms have a competitive ratio of at least Ω(log log k), where k denotes the size of the buffer. We complement this by presenting a deterministic online algorithm for the reordering buffer management problem that obtains a competitive ratio of O(√log k), almost matching the lower bound. This improves upon an algorithm by Avigdor-Elgrabli and Rabani (SODA 2010) that achieves a competitive ratio of O(log k/ log log k).

Authors

• Anna Adamaszek
• Artur Czumaj
• Matthias Englert
• Harald Räcke

Keywords

• online algorithms
• reordering buffer
• sorting buffer