Station Assignment with Reallocation

TL;DR

This paper addresses the complex problem of dynamically assigning mobile clients to static stations with constraints on delay and bandwidth, proposing new reallocation protocols that balance station usage and reallocation costs, supported by theoretical analysis and simulations.

Contribution

It introduces novel reallocation algorithms for dynamic client-station assignment, analyzing trade-offs and providing both theoretical bounds and empirical performance evaluations.

Findings

New protocols outperform previous ones in balancing station usage and reallocation costs.

Theoretical bounds on performance metrics are established.

Simulations show practical effectiveness exceeding theoretical guarantees.

Abstract

We study a dynamic allocation problem that arises in various scenarios where mobile clients joining and leaving the system have to communicate with static stations via radio transmissions. Restrictions are a maximum delay, or laxity, between consecutive client transmissions and a maximum bandwidth that a station can share among its clients. We study the problem of assigning clients to stations so that every client transmits to some station, satisfying those restrictions. We consider reallocation algorithms, where clients are revealed at its arrival time, the departure time is unknown until they leave, and clients may be reallocated to another station, but at a cost proportional to the reciprocal of the client laxity. We present negative results for previous related protocols that motivate the study; we introduce new protocols that expound trade-offs between station usage and reallocation cost; we determine experimentally a classification of the clients attempting to balance those opposite goals; we prove theoretically bounds on our performance metrics; and we show through simulations that, for realistic scenarios, our protocols behave much better than our theoretical guarantees.