Strongly Adaptive Token Distribution

The token distribution (TD) problem, an abstract static variant of load balancing, is defined as follows: letM be a (parallel processor) network with setP of processors. Initially, each processorP ∈P has a certain amountl(P) of tokens. The goal of a TD algorithm, run onM, is to distribute the tokens evenly among the processors. In this paper we introduce the notion of strongly adaptive TD algorithms, i.e., algorithms whose running times come close to the best possible runtime, the off-line complexity of the TD problem, for each individual initial token distributionl. Until now, only weakly adaptive algorithms have been considered, where the running time is measured in terms of the maximum initial load max{l(P)∥P ∈P}.