Bandwidth tree - a data structure for routing in networks with advanced reservations

With the fast development of the Internet, more and more distributed applications will require guaranteed quality of service and maintain minimum network resource during their running sessions. Reservation in advance provides a solution for the need of reserving the network resource for future use like we make reservations in advance in our daily business. Routing has a critical effect on the network reservation process. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical data structure, the bandwidth tree, which records the intervals of available link bandwidth instead of unit time slot. The storage space and searching time complexity under this data structure are independent of the size of the time slots. This overcomes the difficulty in previously proposed research in which larger time slot size loses routing accuracy while smaller time slot size significantly increases routing complexity. The new data structure significantly improves the running time complexity for routing procedures under a variety of QoS requirements.