Pinwheel Broadcast Paradigm in Supporting Power-Conserving Mobile Stations

Abstract

Due to the limited bandwidth and restricted number of channels in the wireless access environment, the broadcast paradigm has become an important technique for accessing messages. Energy saving is an important issue in the mobile computing environment. In this paper, we propose a broadcast paradigm that constructs the broadcast channel according to the access frequency of each type of message in order to save energy in mobile devices. The pinwheel scheduling algorithm (PSA) presented in this paper is used to organize all types of messages in the broadcast channel in the most symmetrical distribution in order to reduce both the tuning and access time. Performance of the proposed mechanism is analyzed and the improvement is demonstrated with numerical results. The results show that the proposed mechanism is capable improving both tuning time and access time as the skew access characteristic exists among the disseminated messages.