Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 December 2015
A k-uniform hypergraph H = (V, E) is called ℓ-orientable if there is an assignment of each edge e ∈ E to one of its vertices v ∈ e such that no vertex is assigned more than ℓ edges. Let Hn,m,k be a hypergraph, drawn uniformly at random from the set of all k-uniform hypergraphs with n vertices and m edges. In this paper we establish the threshold for the ℓ-orientability of Hn,m,k for all k ⩾ 3 and ℓ ⩾ 2, that is, we determine a critical quantity c*k,ℓ such that with probability 1 − o(1) the graph Hn,cn,k has an ℓ-orientation if c < c*k,ℓ , but fails to do so if c > c*k,ℓ .
Our result has various applications, including sharp load thresholds for cuckoo hashing, load balancing with guaranteed maximum load, and massive parallel access to hard disk arrays.
An extended abstract of this work appeared in the Proceedings of the 22nd ACM–SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms: SODA'11.