Dispatching in perfectly-periodic schedules

In a perfectly-periodic schedule, time is divided into time-slots, and each client gets a time slot precisely every predefined number of time slots, called the period of that client. Periodic schedules are useful in mobile communication where they can help save power in the mobile device, and they also enjoy the best possible smoothness. In this paper we study the question of dispatching in a perfectly periodic schedule, namely how to find the next item to schedule, assuming that the schedule is already given somehow. Simple dispatching algorithms suffer from either linear time complexity per slot or from exponential space requirement. We show that if the schedule is given in a natural tree representation, then there exists a way to get the best possible running time per slot for a given space parameter, or the best possible space (up to a polynomial) for a given time parameter. We show that in many practical cases, the running time is constant and the space complexity is polynomial.