2,832 research outputs found
Dagstuhl Reports : Volume 1, Issue 2, February 2011
Online Privacy: Towards Informational Self-Determination on the Internet (Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 11061) : Simone Fischer-Hübner, Chris Hoofnagle, Kai Rannenberg, Michael Waidner, Ioannis Krontiris and Michael Marhöfer Self-Repairing Programs (Dagstuhl Seminar 11062) : Mauro Pezzé, Martin C. Rinard, Westley Weimer and Andreas Zeller Theory and Applications of Graph Searching Problems (Dagstuhl Seminar 11071) : Fedor V. Fomin, Pierre Fraigniaud, Stephan Kreutzer and Dimitrios M. Thilikos Combinatorial and Algorithmic Aspects of Sequence Processing (Dagstuhl Seminar 11081) : Maxime Crochemore, Lila Kari, Mehryar Mohri and Dirk Nowotka Packing and Scheduling Algorithms for Information and Communication Services (Dagstuhl Seminar 11091) Klaus Jansen, Claire Mathieu, Hadas Shachnai and Neal E. Youn
Approximating Generalized Network Design under (Dis)economies of Scale with Applications to Energy Efficiency
In a generalized network design (GND) problem, a set of resources are
assigned to multiple communication requests. Each request contributes its
weight to the resources it uses and the total load on a resource is then
translated to the cost it incurs via a resource specific cost function. For
example, a request may be to establish a virtual circuit, thus contributing to
the load on each edge in the circuit. Motivated by energy efficiency
applications, recently, there is a growing interest in GND using cost functions
that exhibit (dis)economies of scale ((D)oS), namely, cost functions that
appear subadditive for small loads and superadditive for larger loads.
The current paper advances the existing literature on approximation
algorithms for GND problems with (D)oS cost functions in various aspects: (1)
we present a generic approximation framework that yields approximation results
for a much wider family of requests in both directed and undirected graphs; (2)
our framework allows for unrelated weights, thus providing the first
non-trivial approximation for the problem of scheduling unrelated parallel
machines with (D)oS cost functions; (3) our framework is fully combinatorial
and runs in strongly polynomial time; (4) the family of (D)oS cost functions
considered in the current paper is more general than the one considered in the
existing literature, providing a more accurate abstraction for practical energy
conservation scenarios; and (5) we obtain the first approximation ratio for GND
with (D)oS cost functions that depends only on the parameters of the resources'
technology and does not grow with the number of resources, the number of
requests, or their weights. The design of our framework relies heavily on
Roughgarden's smoothness toolbox (JACM 2015), thus demonstrating the possible
usefulness of this toolbox in the area of approximation algorithms.Comment: 39 pages, 1 figure. An extended abstract of this paper is to appear
in the 50th Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC 2018
Algorithms as Mechanisms: The Price of Anarchy of Relax-and-Round
Many algorithms that are originally designed without explicitly considering
incentive properties are later combined with simple pricing rules and used as
mechanisms. The resulting mechanisms are often natural and simple to
understand. But how good are these algorithms as mechanisms? Truthful reporting
of valuations is typically not a dominant strategy (certainly not with a
pay-your-bid, first-price rule, but it is likely not a good strategy even with
a critical value, or second-price style rule either). Our goal is to show that
a wide class of approximation algorithms yields this way mechanisms with low
Price of Anarchy.
The seminal result of Lucier and Borodin [SODA 2010] shows that combining a
greedy algorithm that is an -approximation algorithm with a
pay-your-bid payment rule yields a mechanism whose Price of Anarchy is
. In this paper we significantly extend the class of algorithms for
which such a result is available by showing that this close connection between
approximation ratio on the one hand and Price of Anarchy on the other also
holds for the design principle of relaxation and rounding provided that the
relaxation is smooth and the rounding is oblivious.
We demonstrate the far-reaching consequences of our result by showing its
implications for sparse packing integer programs, such as multi-unit auctions
and generalized matching, for the maximum traveling salesman problem, for
combinatorial auctions, and for single source unsplittable flow problems. In
all these problems our approach leads to novel simple, near-optimal mechanisms
whose Price of Anarchy either matches or beats the performance guarantees of
known mechanisms.Comment: Extended abstract appeared in Proc. of 16th ACM Conference on
Economics and Computation (EC'15
Equilibrium in a two-agent assignment problem
In this paper we address a particular generalisation of the Assignment Problem (AP) in a Multi-Agent setting, where distributed agents share common resources. We consider the problem of determining Pareto-optimal solutions that satisfy a fairness criterion (equilibrium). We show that the solution obtained is equivalent to a Kalai Smorodinsky solution of a suitably defined bargaining problem and characterise the computational complexity of finding such an equilibrium. Additionally, we propose an exact solution algorithm based on a branch-and-bound scheme that exploits bounds obtained by suitably rounding the solutions of the corresponding linear relaxation, and give the results of extensive computational experiments. Copyright © 2009, Inderscience Publishers
Energy-Aware Competitive Power Allocation for Heterogeneous Networks Under QoS Constraints
This work proposes a distributed power allocation scheme for maximizing
energy efficiency in the uplink of orthogonal frequency-division multiple
access (OFDMA)-based heterogeneous networks (HetNets). The user equipment (UEs)
in the network are modeled as rational agents that engage in a non-cooperative
game where each UE allocates its available transmit power over the set of
assigned subcarriers so as to maximize its individual utility (defined as the
user's throughput per Watt of transmit power) subject to minimum-rate
constraints. In this framework, the relevant solution concept is that of Debreu
equilibrium, a generalization of Nash equilibrium which accounts for the case
where an agent's set of possible actions depends on the actions of its
opponents. Since the problem at hand might not be feasible, Debreu equilibria
do not always exist. However, using techniques from fractional programming, we
provide a characterization of equilibrial power allocation profiles when they
do exist. In particular, Debreu equilibria are found to be the fixed points of
a water-filling best response operator whose water level is a function of
minimum rate constraints and circuit power. Moreover, we also describe a set of
sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of Debreu equilibria
exploiting the contraction properties of the best response operator. This
analysis provides the necessary tools to derive a power allocation scheme that
steers the network to equilibrium in an iterative and distributed manner
without the need for any centralized processing. Numerical simulations are then
used to validate the analysis and assess the performance of the proposed
algorithm as a function of the system parameters.Comment: 37 pages, 12 figures, to appear IEEE Trans. Wireless Commu
Pareto Boundary of the Rate Region for Single-Stream MIMO Interference Channels: Linear Transceiver Design
We consider a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference channel
(IC), where a single data stream per user is transmitted and each receiver
treats interference as noise. The paper focuses on the open problem of
computing the outermost boundary (so-called Pareto boundary-PB) of the
achievable rate region under linear transceiver design. The Pareto boundary
consists of the strict PB and non-strict PB. For the two user case, we compute
the non-strict PB and the two ending points of the strict PB exactly. For the
strict PB, we formulate the problem to maximize one rate while the other rate
is fixed such that a strict PB point is reached. To solve this non-convex
optimization problem which results from the hard-coupled two transmit
beamformers, we propose an alternating optimization algorithm. Furthermore, we
extend the algorithm to the multi-user scenario and show convergence. Numerical
simulations illustrate that the proposed algorithm computes a sequence of
well-distributed operating points that serve as a reasonable and complete inner
bound of the strict PB compared with existing methods.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in IEEE Tans. Signal
Process. June. 201
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