Markov Paging

This paper considers the problem of paging under the assumption that the sequence of pages accessed is generated by a Markov chain. We use this model to study the fault-rate of paging algorithms. We first draw on the theory of Markov decision processes to characterize the paging algorithm that achie...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSIAM journal on computing Vol. 30; no. 3; pp. 906 - 922
Main Authors Karlin, Anna R., Phillips, Steven J., Raghavan, Prabhakar
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Philadelphia Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 2000
Subjects
Algorithms
Competition
Computer science
Evictions
Markov analysis
Probability
Probability distribution
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Summary:This paper considers the problem of paging under the assumption that the sequence of pages accessed is generated by a Markov chain. We use this model to study the fault-rate of paging algorithms. We first draw on the theory of Markov decision processes to characterize the paging algorithm that achieves optimal fault-rate on any Markov chain. Next, we address the problem of devising a paging strategy with low fault-rate for a given Markov chain. We show that a number of intuitive approaches fail. Our main result is a polynomial-time procedure that, on any Markov chain, will give a paging algorithm with fault-rate at most a constant times optimal. Our techniques show also that some algorithms that do poorly in practice fail in the Markov setting, despite known (good) performance guarantees when the requests are generated independently from a probability distribution.
ISSN:0097-5397
1095-7111
DOI:10.1137/S0097539794268042