Algorithms for power-aware resource activation

We study the problem of minimally activating a resource that is shared by multiple jobs. In a power-aware computing environment, the resource needs to be activated (powered-up) so that it can service the jobs. Each job specifies an interval during which its needs the services of the resource and the duration (time length) for which it requires the resource to be active. Our goal is to activate the resource for a minimum amount of time, while satisfying all the jobs. We study two variants of this problem, the contiguous and the non-contiguous cases. In the contiguous case, each job requires that its demand for the resource be serviced with a set of contiguous timeslots whereas in the non-contiguous case, the demand of a job may be serviced with a set of non-contiguous timeslots. For the contiguous case, we present an optimal polynomial time algorithm; this improves the best known result, which is an approximation algorithm having a ratio of 2. For the non-contiguous case, we present efficient algorithms for finding optimal and approximate solutions.