Online Page Migration on Ring Networks in Uniform Model

This paper explores the problem of page migration in ring networks. A ring network is a connected graph, in which each node is connected with exactly two other nodes. In this problem, one of the nodes in a given network holds a page of size D. This node is called the server and the page is a non-duplicable data in the network. Requests are issued by nodes to access the page one after another. Every time a new request is issued, the server must serve the request and may migrate to another node before the next request arrives. A service costs the distance between the server and the requesting node, and the migration costs the distance of the migration multiplied by D. The problem is to minimize the total costs of services and migrations. We study this problem in uniform model, for which the page has a unit size, i.e. D = 1. A 3.326-competitive algorithm improving the current best upper bound is designed. We show that this ratio is tight for our algorithm.