A lower-bound algorithm for minimizing network communication in real-time systems

In this paper, we propose a pseudo-polynomial-time lower-bound algorithm for the problem of assigning and scheduling real-time tasks in a distributed system such that the network communication is minimized The key feature of our algorithm is translating the task assignment problem into the so called k-cut problem of a graph, which is known to be solvable in polynomial time for fixed k. Experiments show that the lower bound computed by our algorithm in fact is optimal in up to 89% of the cases and increases the speed of an overall optimization algorithm by a factor of two on average.