Improving the competitive ratio of the online OVSF code assignment problem (Q1662487)

Summary: Online OVSF code assignment has an important application to wireless communications. Recently, this problem was formally modeled as an online problem, and performances of online algorithms have been analyzed by the competitive analysis. The previous best upper and lower bounds on the competitive ratio were 10 and 5/3, respectively. In this paper, we improve them to 7 and 2, respectively. We also show that our analysis for the upper bound is tight by giving an input sequence for which the competitive ratio of our algorithm is \(7-\varepsilon\) for an arbitrary constant \(\varepsilon>0\). For a preliminary version see [Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 5369, 64--76 (2008; Zbl 1183.68751)].