Analysis of data structures for admission control of advance reservation requests

Advance reservations are a useful method to allocate resources of various kinds in many different environments. Among others, a major advantage of this kind of reservation is the improved admission probability for requests that are made sufficiently early. In order to implement reliable admission control for these requests, it is important to store information in data structures about future allocations and to provide fast access to the available information. In this paper, two data structures are examined: a tree specially designed to support advance reservations is compared to arrays. Both structures are examined analytically and by measurements in a realistic network management system capable of advance reservations. It turns out that arrays are far better suited to support the required operations, in particular when large time intervals need to be scanned.