Channel-Combine Strategies for On-Demand Multicast on Mobile Wireless Networks

Abstract

This paper considers a communication problem in a closed area, such as stock market, sport stadium, or showroom, where people may move around and dynamically request for a piece of data. PDAs of hand-held PCs downloading the data through wireless networks is a promising solution to such scenarios. One native solution is to allocate for each request a separate channel, but this will require a lot of channels if the demand is high. One way to relieve this problem is to adjust the speeds that mobile hosts receive data such that if two mobile hosts are on the same data point, one of them can be handoff to listen to the channel of the other. In this way, the channel of the former mobile host can be released. However, this should be done only if the pre-specified QoS requirement is not violated. In this paper, we develop three such channel-combine strategies, called Binary, Shortest-Distance-First, and Partition. Simulation and experimental results are also presented.