Section: Scientific Foundations

Models for Platform Topology and Parameter Estimation

On the other hand, in order to establish complexity and approximation results, we also need to rely on a precise theoretical model of the targeted platforms.

• At a lower level, several models have been proposed to describe interference between several simultaneous communications. In the 1-port model, a node cannot simultaneously send to (and/or receive from) more than one node. Most of the “steady state” scheduling results have been obtained using this model. On the other hand, some authors propose to model incoming and outgoing communication from a node using fictitious incoming and outgoing links, whose bandwidths are fixed. The main advantage of this model, although it might be slightly less accurate, is that it does not require strong synchronization and that many scheduling problems can be expressed as multi-commodity flow problems, for which decentralized efficient algorithms are known. Another important issue is to model the bandwidth actually allocated to each communication when several communications compete for the same long-distance link.

• At a higher level, proving good approximation ratios on general graphs may be too difficult, and it has been observed that actual platforms often exhibit a simple structure. For instance, many real life networks satisfy small-world properties, and it has been proved, for instance, that greedy routing protocols on small world networks achieve good performance. It is therefore of interest to prove that logical (given by the interactions between hosts) and physical platforms (given by the network links) exhibit some structure in order to derive efficient algorithms.