Broadcast Scheduling for Multiple Channels in Wireless Information Systems

Abstract

Some characteristics of wireless information systems such as limited bandwidth and power supply provide many new challenges for traditional techniques. Data broadcast is considered an efficient way, in terms of energy consumption and bandwidth utilization, for disseminating data to a massive number of mobile clients in such a system. Several papers have been devoted to the issue of broadcast scheduling. Most of them assume that each mobile client needs only one data page. However, in many situations a mobile client might need data of more than one page. Under these circumstances, how to minimize the access time for mobile clients is a non-trivial task. The scheduling strategy should take the affinity between data pages into consideration. Moreover, the past work tackled the problem mainly from the view point of broadcasting the data pages over single channel. As a number of wireless channels are available, the issue of broadcast scheduling becomes more complicated. In this paper we propose five scheduling strategies for data broadcast.