New Bounds on the Competitive Ratio of Longest Queue Drop: 1.46929591 <= CR(LQD) <= 1.683652

RESUMO

We study the competitive ratio of Longest Queue Drop (LQD), the canonical buffer management policy for shared memory switches, for which the previously published bounds were CR(LQD) in [1.44546086, 1.6918]. We improve both ends. For the lower bound, we provide an exact-integer certificate on a new instance family, the front-loaded family, which gives $\mathrm{CR}(\mathrm{LQD}) >= 184815365566285 / 125784985866185 = 1.46929591...$, the exact ratio on a specific finite instance evaluated against the exactly optimal offline policy. The instance is evaluated under one fixed tie rule, but the bound does not depend on the tie rule: an adaptive coupling transfers the certified value to every non-clairvoyant deterministic tie rule, and to every randomized tie rule in the adaptive adversary sense. For the upper bound, we prove that CR(LQD) <= 1.683652 by replacing the per-packet endpoint relaxation in the endgame of Antoniadis et al. (2024) with the continuum envelope relaxation of the same payment expression, which we solve exactly in closed form; unlike the lower bound, this upper bound holds for every tie rule. In the process, we find a gap in the derivation of the published proof's aggregation step (their Lemma 18). We repair the aggregation with one amortized lemma and an exact finite-head analysis; the repair restores the published 1.6918, which in turn restores the weaker conference guarantee 1.707 of Antoniadis et al. (ICALP 2021), and it also supports our further improvement.