Allocation Problems in Scalable Distributed Data Structures

We investigate the servers allocation problem in a network of workstations, a first step toward the analysis of more realistic scenarios for Scalable and Distributed Data Structures. Unlike the previous frameworks, we consider the cost of the messages exchanged among the sites in terms of time or length of the paths traversed in the network. The immediate consequence is that the choice of the position in the network of a new server after a split of an overflowing one is not a trivial problem. We concentrate on both off-line and on-line settings, and provide optimal and nearly optimal approximation algorithms.