Average performance of a greedy algorithm for the on-line minimum matching problem on Euclidean space

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the average performance analysis of a simple greedy algorithm for solving the on-line minimum matching problem on Euclidean space. The algorithm has been shown to be (2 n − 1)-competitive, where 2 n is the total number of points in the plane. However, we show that the average matching cost incurred by the algorithm is bounded by 2.3 n times the average cost of the optimal minimum matching when the number of points is large (100 points is sufficiently large in our experiment).